Three Tips for Hiring your first MSP Salesperson
Take a minute to ask yourself the following questions:
- Do I have enough assemblance of a sales model in place to plug in a salesperson?
- Do I know who I need to hire?
- Do I have a modality for vetting candidates to ensure I’m plugging in the right person for the job?
1.Do I have enough assemblance of a sales model in place to plug in a salesperson?
You’re hiring to replicate a process you already know works – you’re not hiring a salesperson to figure out how to make selling YOUR services a repeatable process WHILE also doing the work selling the services. Your salesperson will only be as successful as the sales process you create so you need to document that process on paper A-Z. Consider yourself The Ghost in the Machine (80s movie reference), you’ve created the construct for translating prospects into leads and leads into clients and now you’re plugging someone into it. You have to have been in that role – experienced the pushbacks, circumvented the objections, navigated the highs and lows, maintained the right mindset – so you’re prepared to instill that mindset and teach those exact steps executing the roadmap you’ve created.
2.Do I know who I need to hire?
MSPs don’t need to employ a team of techs comprised entirely of Michael Jordans to operate profitably. If you subscribe to this notion, you know that the optimal hire isn’t always going to be the most impressively qualified candidate. The results of who you hire will only be as good as the sales model you plug them into and you don’t want to be paying people for their time trying to figure out what to do, pay them to do what you need them to do. If your sales model is sound, you don’t have to rely solely on talent when you can rely on your model. This process starts with creating a candidate composite based on your experiences in the seat, a set of defined questions to uncover which skills align with that composite and then understanding the psychology of “getting the answers to the test” during the interview, something we’ll talk more about later.
3.Do I have a modality for vetting candidates to ensure I’m plugging in the right person for the job?
Hope isn’t a strategy. Having informal interviews, shooting from the hip and then extending an offer to the person you “vibed” with the best isn’t smart hiring – it’s lazy and it can be costly. You’re not building a social club. You have a job open because you’ve designed a set of repeatable processes that need to be executed in order to scale your MSP model. Not only do you need to know which combination of skills aligns best you’re your requirements, you need to know how to spot them. Plus, sales jobs are inherently difficult, so you also need to align the right mindset and motivations in order to feel confident you will retain this person for the long-term. It should be highly systemized so you aren’t running a different interview process every time, which makes it more difficult assessing the validity of your final assessment of someone. Interviewing is the complete opposite of shooting from the hip.
Takeaways
- You’re not ready to hire until you have a sales model documented that can be translated into a tangible playbook you can hand to someone else – and it can’t be “pie in the sky” it needs to be rooted in what you know actually works because you’ve done it.
- Build a candidate composite so you can spot the right candidate during the interview process.
- Don’t shoot from the hip / systemize your interview process
