Right People
Your Customers Disqualify Bad Salespeople in Five Minutes. You Hire Them in Thirty.
You run EOS. Every department runs on process, scorecard, and accountability. Operations. Finance. HR. All of it functions the way the EOS model promised it would.
Except sales.
You sit across from a candidate. The resume is good. The education is right. The industry experience checks out. They are well-spoken. They have stories. They run the room. Thirty minutes in, you have made up your mind.
You write the offer. You onboard. You wait.
Six months later the deals are not closing. The pipeline is thin. You are back in the seat you said you would never sit in again, doing the closing yourself.
Different salesperson. Same result.
What happened? The candidate sold you. You bought.
The Wrong Belief That Keeps You Hiring the Wrong People
The belief most CEOs hold about sales hiring is this:
we just need to find the right person.
That is not your problem.
You have applied the same inside-out thinking to sales that worked everywhere else in your EOS company. Sales is outside-in. That is a different problem entirely.
That is not a luck problem. That is a sales recruiting process problem.
Most sales recruiting is not designed to find the right salesperson. It is designed to find the best of the worst.
I have installed this system inside dozens of EOS construction and distribution companies stuck in this exact loop. The pattern is identical every time. So is the fix. It has nothing to do with finding better people — and everything to do with running a hiring process that actually disqualifies the wrong candidates before they cost you another six months.
Your problem is the salesperson found you.
They sold you on the hire the way you wish they would sell your customers. Then the customers showed up and the selling stopped.
In every other department, you would not run hiring this way. You would build a process. You’d know exactly what success in that seat looked like. You would put the candidate through enough rigor that nobody could fake their way through.
In sales, you have accepted that hiring is a coin flip. Twenty percent of the people you hire stick. Eighty percent flame out or stall.
Why Sales Is the One Seat EOS Can't Fix on Its Own
Every EOS company has the same problem with the sales seat. The operating system works everywhere else because you built process around it. The Accounting department has GAAP – Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. The sales seat fails because there aren’t Generally Accepted Sales Principles. This isn’t an EOS issue. Your company must have a set of sales principles from which to operate.
My framework has four steps. Think of it as a sales hiring operating system.
- Attract — make the right people show up and the wrong people self-eliminate.
- Select — predict performance with rigorous disqualification, not a polished interview.
- Hire — sell the offer at the close, with a comp plan top performers can break through.
- Retain — sell the offer at the close, with a comp plan top performers can break through.
Most companies I work with are broken at step one: attract.
The ones that are not broken at step one are broken at step two. The ones that limp past steps one and two stumble at three and four.
The damage starts at the top of the funnel.
STEP 1: ATTRACT
Attract sales talent, not just resumes.
Your job posting looks like every other job posting in your market.
Sales professional. Five-plus years experience. Hunter mentality. Base plus commission.
It says nothing. It repels nobody. It pulls in the same pool of mediocre resumes every other company is already fighting over. You pick the best of a bad pool and wonder why nothing changes.
The posting is the first filter. It either does the work or it doesn’t.
I build the job profile first — what success actually looks like in your seat, your market, with your buyer. Then I write the posting around that profile. The right candidates read it and see themselves. The wrong candidates scroll past it.
A-players tell me the same thing every time. They saw the posting and said — this one is different. This one is for me.
That does not happen by accident.
You get a filtered pool before the first phone call. Not the best of whoever applied. The right people. Already sorted.
STEP 2: SELECT
Qualify your candidates like your buyers qualify your salespeople.
The resume is the most edited document in the candidate’s life. Every number smoothed. Every gap explained. Every line rewritten.
You are not reading a track record. You are reading their best lie.
The interview is worse. You decide in the first thirty minutes. Everything after that is theater — you are confirming the bias you already formed. By the time the second interview is scheduled, you are not selecting. You are buying.
I run every candidate through a three-layer assessment before they get near an interview:
- Will to Sell. Does this person actually want to sell — or do they want a sales title?
- Sales DNA. Do they have the wiring? Comfort with money conversations. Willingness to push back on a buyer. Ability to hear no without folding. This is not a gut call. It is measurable. Objective data on what is underneath.
- Skill Gaps. What do they need to learn for this specific seat — and is the gap closeable in your timeline?
After the assessment, comes structured interviews with defined scorecards. Every candidate answers the same questions in the same sequence. Then you are comparing real data across the whole pool — not deciding whose stories you liked best.
You get candidates who earned the conversation. With the evidence to show you exactly why.
Stop Pitching Before They've Earned It
STEP 3: HIRE
Most companies pitch too early.
First interview — you lead with the company story, the trajectory, the comp plan, the autonomy. The candidate has heard everything before they have proven anything. By the time the offer is on the table there is nothing left to sell. They sign without urgency. Or they do not sign at all.
Selling the offer belongs at the close. After they have earned the conversation.
I sequence it correctly. Qualify first. Qualify second. Sell the offer last.
I rebuild your comp plan as a set of instructions — not a payroll line item. It tells your new hire what behaviors you want and what outcomes you will reward. It is structured so the top performer can break through it. Not bump against a ceiling and start looking around at month six.
If your comp plan is built around what an average rep can earn, you are pre-selecting for average reps. The A-player runs the math, sees the ceiling, and walks before the second interview.
With my system you get a candidate who earned the offer. And a comp plan that pulls the right people in — and keeps them there.
STEP 4: RETAIN
You're Onboarding the Product. Not the Story.
Five days of product training. A binder. A catalog walkthrough.
By the end your new hire knows what you sell. They do not know who the buyer is. They do not know what the buyer is fighting in their own business. They cannot position a conversation. They default to features. They default to discounting.
That is not a hiring problem. That is an onboarding problem.
I build the onboarding sequence around the message first. Who the buyer actually is — not the persona on a marketing slide. The real one. What they are afraid of. What they are trying to fix. How your offer connects to that.
Your new hire learns to run the conversation before they learn the catalog. They run the same conversation your best rep runs. Product training comes after they know how to sell.
A-players do not want autonomy on day one. They want a system. They want the playbook. They want to know what good looks like so they can go be it. The autonomy comes later — after they have proven they can run the system.
You get a rep booking qualified meetings by week six. Running real conversations. Defending your price.
That is what Right People delivers when it is built and installed.
A Construction Company. Five Hires. One Survivor.
A construction company came to me after running the same loop you might be running right now.
- Five sales hires in two years. One still there at the two-year mark. That survivor was average.
- We installed the system. Job profile. Shackleton-style job posting. Real assessments. Structured interviews. Scorecards. Compensation aligned to the behaviors they actually wanted rewarded.
- Two hires came out the other side. Both became top producers — month after month. Win rates at 47%. One weak rep moved off the payroll. Revenue up 37% in eighteen months.
That is what a hiring system does.
The luck stops being luck when the system does the work.
How We Work
Three steps. No mystery.
-
Role Configuration
I build the job profile — what this specific candidate needs to be great at in your company, your market, and your buyer’s seat. Then the Shackleton-style job posting that filters out the wrong candidates before they reach your inbox. -
Selection
I run a Phone screen. Culture interview. Sales interview. I build the scorecards. I align the compensation plan to the behaviors you actually want rewarded. -
Final Recommendations
I bring you the candidates who survived the system — with the evidence, the scoring, and the honest read. You make the offer. That is what a sales recruitment consultant does when the work is built around your seat, your market, and your buyer — not a generic search. Your sales seat has a system problem. Forty-five years of evidence says it's fixable. Find out where yours is breaking down.
You Cannot Hire Your Way Around the Message
Right People is only half the system. Without the message, even the right hire defaults to discounting.
Questions CEOs Ask Before They Call
Why do most sales hires fail in mid-market companies?
Most mid-market sales hires fail because the hiring process was designed to find the most charming candidate, not the best seller. The salesperson sold the founder. The founder bought. Six months later the deals are not closing. The fix is a hiring system with four steps — Attract, Select, Hire, Retain — that disqualifies the wrong candidates before they reach the interview room. Companies that install the system move from a twenty percent hiring success rate to eighty.
How much does a bad sales hire really cost?
A bad sales hire in a $25M-plus company costs far more than the salary line. Add the missed pipeline, the deals that stalled, the customers that went cold, the founder’s time pulled back into closing, and the ramp time burned on the replacement. The real cost runs into the hundreds of thousands — sometimes seven figures over eighteen months. The hire that does not work is rarely the cheap mistake the offer letter suggests.
Why does my sales hire interview great but underperform on the job?
Because the interview is a different skill than the job. The candidate is selling. You are buying. The interview rewards charisma, storytelling, and rapport. The job rewards prospecting, qualifying, handling objections, and asking for the money. Most hiring processes test for the wrong skill and confirm the wrong bias. A real selection process uses assessments, structured interviews, and scorecards — so you are predicting the job, not grading the audition.
What is the difference between sales experience and sales DNA?
Sales experience is what is on the resume — years in the industry, products sold, deals claimed to be closed. Sales DNA is the wiring underneath. The will to sell. The comfort with money conversations. The willingness to push back on a buyer. The ability to hear “no” without flinching. A candidate with industry experience and weak DNA recites spec sheets and defaults to discounting. A candidate with strong DNA can sell across industries. Most companies hire for the resume and wonder why nothing closes.
Why do EOS companies struggle with sales hiring?
EOS gives you a strong operating system everywhere except the sales seat. The integrator runs operations. The owner-led sales engine that got you to $25M starts breaking. The first VP of Sales hire is treated like any other leadership hire — and sales is not like any other seat. The buyer evaluates your salesperson in five minutes. You evaluate the candidate in thirty. The mismatch is why strong EOS companies almost always have weak sales teams.
The sales seat is the one seat in your accountability chart that requires outside-in thinking. Every other seat runs on internal process. Sales runs on the buyer’s process. Until you build the hiring system around that distinction, the seat stays broken — no matter how well the rest of the business runs on EOS.
How do I write a job posting that attracts A-player salespeople?
A-player salespeople scroll past generic postings — five-plus years experience, hunter mentality, base plus commission. That posting attracts the same B-tier pool every other company in your market is fighting over. A posting that attracts A-players does two things at once. It speaks specifically to the kind of person who wants the job. It repels the wrong candidates before they apply. The Shackleton-style posting works because it tells the truth about the difficulty of the role — and only the right candidates self-select into the conversation.
You Are Not Unlucky
Almost every CEO I work with has hired the wrong salesperson three or four times. They have fired them, or at least some of them. They have run the search again. They have talked themselves into the next “right person.” They have watched the same outcome happen again.
It is not a hiring streak. It is a hiring system that is missing.
You are not unlucky. You are running a coin flip and calling it a hiring process.
