13 Common Myths About Hiring Salespeople: Debunked

Many businesses will at one point or another decide that it’s time to get serious about growing sales. A natural conclusion is to hire a salesperson. Unfortunately, this is rarely the silver bullet that saves the day. Most of the time it’s easy to blame the hired salesperson for failing to generate results. However, the real cause is more often than not to do with misconceptions the business owner has about hiring salespeople.

After 25+ years in business, I’ve witnessed many situations when sales professionals weren’t as productive as they could be.

Based on my team’s experience across almost every B2B industry possible, I’ve compiled 13 common myths that people hold about salespeople. The purpose of this article is to debunk these myths so that you can achieve better results.

You will discover that the true key to success has nothing to do with the salesperson and everything to do with you and your business. This is great news because it means you can be in control of the outcome. Hiring salespeople doesn’t need to be left to luck.

Myth 1: A Salesperson Can Save Your Business

Hiring salespeople is about growing sales and oftentimes, business owners think about growing sales when things aren’t going that well. Meaning they need to increase sales ASAP.

There are also situations when business is going well and you want to grow sales. A new salesperson seems to be the logical way of achieving this.

Either way, this myth is about having great expectations when hiring a salesperson.

While I don’t want anyone to think that a new salesperson doesn’t bring hope of new sales, in many cases it remains just that – hope.

Why?

A new salesperson usually cannot save or better your business, especially in the short term for these five reasons:

They need time to learn more about your business, product or service before they can be articulate and convincing enough to sell. If you need sales fast this factor is especially relevant because nothing will ever be fast enough. There seem to be some solutions – see Myths 3 & 4, 9. The reality is if your business is prepared (see the end of this article for practical ideas) then this time can be considerably shortened.
They need material to learn about your business, products or services. If you do not have much written and everything is in your head, you will have to invest a lot of time and energy to train and do knowledge transfer.
They need a sales process to follow and often times there is no written proven sales process, so they need to come up with one and test it. Knowing how to do this is a skill not everyone possesses, and testing takes time. See Myth 6 to learn more.
They need leads; if you don’t have enough leads, extra time is spent generating leads. See Myths 5 & 7 to discover some truths about this.
When you are in B2B, your sales cycle could be weeks or months. That immediately translates into needing more time before results may occur. All this time costs money.

The bottom line is that a salesperson can become a real asset for every business. As long as the business is prepared. Watch this short 17-minute video before hiring salespeople

Myth 2: Salespeople Have Special Sales Skills

I’m not denying the importance of skill in sales. Instead, I want to emphasize that there’s no special mythical skill guaranteeing results. I haven’t seen any salesperson possessing such a skill. Success in sales is often a result of the environment.

The employer’s support, including sales tools, processes, and documentation, plays a crucial role. These elements contribute to success factors that empower the salesperson. Unfortunately, salespeople often struggle to identify these success factors. Consequently, they can’t replicate them in your business. It’s your responsibility as the owner to recognize and implement these success factors

That is why when a new salesperson gets hired into a company with no history of employing salespeople they:

Receive no support
Have no documentation
No process to follow
And no one knows the success factors.

No wonder they either fail or take months longer to succeed!

Note, that sales skills, though not mystical, do exist and are needed. They can be taught, or even self-learned. An astounding number of salespeople do NOT invest in their education unless it’s paid for by an employer.

Myth 3: Hiring Salespeople From Your Industry Guarantees Success

On paper, this logical conclusion seems reasonable: transplant a salesperson from your competition, and they should be able to produce results. However, in reality, this is very rarely the case. Several reasons contribute to this.

Firstly, their contacts are unlikely to jump ship with them. While an established relationship exists, it’s usually insufficient to convince a client to move. The same holds for any prospects they’ve been working on.

Secondly, the support and sales tools your company has are unlikely to mirror those of your competition. This means that the success factors that made them successful with your competitors may not exist in your company. Since most salespeople cannot identify their own success factors, they’re unlikely to know how to recreate them.

Myth 4: Any Salesperson Outside of Your Industry Will Take Years to Upskill

Counter to the previous myth is this one. There is some truth to this. Salespeople from totally opposite industries may struggle. But salespeople from similar industries, similar sales processes, similar sales cycles, or similar success factors are transferrable. In fact, they can often be a better pick than those from your industry.

What you really need to have in place, is a good sales process and a good understanding of the benefits of your products. Essentially, if you know how to sell your product or service, most salespeople should be able to pick this up. Technical details and facts can be learned over time, or referenced from a brochure.

You can think about this like maths. You have the formulae and then you have the application of it. In the past, we used to memorise the formula. Today, kids are taught the formula and how to apply it. It’s often given to them during exams so that you’re testing the application, not rote memorisation. The same applies to salespeople, features of your product can be memorised over time. But understanding the benefits is so much more important, and usually easier to remember.

Myth 5: Any Salesperson Can Generate Leads

Really? International research shows that salespeople spend an average of 2 hours a day identifying leads. This is before they start approaching them. So I suppose there is some truth to this. The question is if you want to pay for these 2 hours.

Business owners often hire a salesperson in a situation where they don’t really have a source of leads. Sure, maybe some come organically from referrals or google search enquiries. But this often isn’t enough to occupy 40 hours a week. As business owners, we often think what’s the big deal? A salesperson is an expert in sales, so therefore they should know how to generate leads.

Well, there are two big issues here:

We don’t tend to budget for any additional expenses like buying a list of prospects, paying for LinkedIn Premium, running ads etc.
Salespeople often don’t actually know how to efficiently and effectively generate leads themselves.

The first issue is fairly easy to solve – set aside at minimum an additional 5-10k annually for any sales-related expenses. Ideally, give this to the salesperson as a budget so they can go off and be independent of asking you to approve every little expense. Be firm in putting boundaries to ensure they don’t go over budget.

The second is trickier to resolve and hits at the heart of why you can’t just hire a salesperson and expect them to make sales. A lot of successful salespeople have a source of leads coming to them at all times. These leads are generated through processes that have already been established and tested by the company.

So, when hiring salespeople, if you do not have this source of leads already established, then you’re in trouble. Most salespeople will not have been part of the process of setting up these lead generation processes. So, it’s not their fault that they have no clue how to replicaten them.

Some salespeople can generate leads.

However even in these cases, what likely happened is that their previous company has processes in place to explain exactly how to do this. They maybe had a list of prospects that the salesperson could call or email. They may have had processes explaining how to approach people on LinkedIn. Or any other of a hundred ways to generate leads.

In short, most salespeople do not have an innate ability to generate enough leads by themselves. They are used to being given some form of support in this area. And if your company is not prepared to do this, your new hire may struggle. Or worse, they’ll waste a lot of time every day looking for leads. I’m not really sure what’s worse!

Myth 6: A Salesperson Can Create a Sales Process

Another popular myth is that a salesperson can come in and easily create a sales process for the company. However, this is not often the case. Most salespeople have never created a sales process before. So expecting someone with no prior experience to create a working sales process is a bit of a pipe dream. Especially if you expect them to do so with no extra budget, and continue selling at the same time.

In short, if a salesperson was successful at their previous job, it’s likely because the surroundings set them up for success. I’m not suggesting they did nothing to achieve success. They would have diligently utilised the resources available to them. I’m suggesting they are not always capable of developing these resources from scratch.

To top this off, if you have a sales process that is vastly different from the sales process they are used to, you could have trouble. They may fundamentally disagree or genuinely not understand your sales process. In the end, they’ll either consciously or subconsciously sabotage it, resulting in no benefit to your business.

Myth 7: A Salesperson Knows the Market and Has a List of Prospects in Mind

Sadly NO.

A salesperson is not a walking directory. We should stop expecting them to come with a Rolodex of prospects ready to buy. Yes, they should have some connections. But this will never be enough to sustain them for long.

What’s worse is when salespeople start to approach these connections. They often find that while the connection may be warm, they’re never ready to buy. This is backed up by newer studies done about sales. Recent studies have found that relationships are not enough to win sales. It’s become more around what ideas you can bring to the table, things that challenge a prospect’s way of thinking. Then follow this with a solution to this previously unknown challenge.

As a business, you need to be ready to arm your salespeople with lists of your target market. Whether these be warm, cold, or hot, who cares. It’s always cheaper to give a list than have someone wasting time googling or looking up random prospects on LinkedIn.

Myth 8: A Salesperson Knows What to do to Succeed in Your Business

Salespeople that are new to your business will have no idea where to focus unless you tell them. This seems like a simple enough idea, yet it’s not always followed through. What I mean by this is they have no clue what your margins are, what’s in stock, or what capacity exists. You need to decide all of this and tell them.

In addition to this, salespeople will not know the benefits of your products the way you do. After you’ve picked out what they should focus on, you must give them the benefits. Please do not leave them to figure it out yourself, this is such a waste of time.

Myth 9: A Salesperson Knows How to Grow Your Business

Why? It’s YOUR business.

No matter how experienced a salesperson is, they’re not likely to know how to grow your business. Because they are not the business owner, and never will be.

Think about it. Your business has a lot of moving parts to it:

You as a business owner know the market, its needs and challenges.
You were instrumental in developing or choosing the products and services to respond to market needs and wants.
You have zero or incomplete records of the above.
You keep many important elements in your head.
You are a bit cautious to share so as to not grow a future competitor.

How can an outsider to your business, get into your head to know it all? Even if they’re a close friend, a former employee, or even your spouse, they’re not a mind reader.

Sure, a fresh look at your business may be valuable. But only if the salesperson knows how to do it because this is not a common skill.

The bottom line is that the vast majority of salespeople are not able to correctly determine the pathway to grow your business. This is something you need to show them.

Myth 10: Salespeople Can Set Up and Use Technology for Sales

We all are probably somewhat aware of salespeople’s distaste for CRMs. Not all salespeople of course, but definitely the majority don’t enjoy doing activities that they can’t directly tie down to a sale. Using a CRM is often lumped into these low-level activities.

It should therefore not be a surprise that a salesperson cannot set up a CRM. If they don’t like using one, then of course they’re not the right people to set one up.

Apart from a CRM, there are many additional tools you may want to use for sales enablement. As a rule of thumb, none of these can be properly implemented by your average salesperson.

Besides, do you really want a salesperson to spend their time on IT implementation? Trying to figure out how to make your systems similar to the competitor they worked for instead of making sales? Consider that the same systems probably won’t work for your business.

Myth 11: A Sales Manager Will Make a Good Salesperson

You might be looking for a salesperson and come across a sales manager with decades of experience. They led a team at their last company and are looking for the next challenge. It seems like a perfect match! You might even wonder why they’d want to work for you. Of course, they ask for more money, and you believe them to be worth the extra expense due to their seniority.

All of this is wrong.

A sales manager is usually not an amazing salesperson. That’s why they were promoted to manager in the first place because they have the skills to manage. They are likely decent at sales, and know a thing or two about opening opportunities, following them up, and closing.

Here’s the catch though:

They are a senior candidate and will have a difficult time transitioning to a junior role. The days when they were younger, hungrier and more mobile are long gone.

Sales managers are used to leading a team and not really having to do much grunt work. Depending on the company they’re also used to having perks like a car. So, when you hire a sales manager, they’ll seem amazing on paper. But once they have to go out and start prospecting from the ground up, they will quickly falter.

To add to this, they’re likely not savvy when it comes to modern technology. Sure, they will have a reasonable grasp of it, but chances are they’ll struggle. Zoom meetings will be a pain for them, they’d rather have lunch or coffee with a prospect. They’re used to having people do things for them, and without this added layer of support, it becomes a nightmare to close.

In short, hiring an ex-sales manager into a salesperson position is almost always a recipe for disaster. Even in the cases of high-level sales, there will be better candidates.

Myth 12: A Salesperson Can be Left Mostly Alone to Work

You wouldn’t tell your hairdresser how to cut your hair, so why tell your salespeople how to do their jobs? Leave them alone, it’ll be fine, right? Wrong.

Allowing salespeople to operate independently leads to failure. It takes a very special salesperson to be able to succeed on their own with no supervision or check-ins. Instead, opt for a semi-hands-on approach.

You want to strike the balance between micromanaging and being a submarine. A weekly sales one-on-one is a good start. This will give them the freedom to do their own thing during the week, and let you keep your finger on the pulse and troubleshoot anything that comes up. Setting goals and assigning low-level activities for them to complete is important. A weekly meeting is a chance to ensure these are being completed.

Myth 13: A Great Salesperson Will Make a Great Sales Manager

These three reasons may help to understand it better:

A very different skill set and personality traits are needed for a manager vs a salesperson.
You will lose a performing salesperson and the business will struggle to sustain the cost of hiring another person to replenish the vacancy.
There is lots of evidence this move does not work.

Even though a Sales Manager needs to understand and is better to be good at sales the difference in the required skill set and level of leadership to perform this role properly is naturally prohibitive for many salespeople. That’s not a consideration but a fact researched and established over decades.

What Can You Do?

I bet these 13 myths correlate with many of your own “lessons learned”.

You may ask what’s next and what is the solution to a situation that many have to tolerate because it’s not clear what to do.

Summarising the combined and most painful experience in our business as well as 100s of businesses we worked with over the years, I feel quietly confident that we figured out the key piece of the puzzle, which has no relation to what people usually look at when they hire the first or the next salesperson.

Our solution has nothing to do with:

Recruitment (that comes later)
Sales training (that is needed later as well)
Your industry (because it works equally well for any industry)
Your country, language, culture
Quality of candidates (because it needs to be done regardless of this)
Technical knowledge required
Size of your sales team

It has everything to do with how much your business is prepared for a salesperson.

It’s comprehensive, yet beautifully straightforward and every Sales Manager and Business Owner I presented it to has agreed this is what is needed. It’s designed to include the best of everything we know that works in sales today.

Now is the time for you to discover what this solution is and how it can work for you.

Assia Salikhova

Smarketing Lab Co-Creator,
developer of profitable B2B solutions to grow your business.

assia@smarketinglab.co.nz

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