The 3 key traits Salesforce wants in its sales candidates, based on an internal analysis of the software giant's top performers
- Salesforce looked into the traits of its best salespeople to see what made them so successful.
- The analysis showed that technical expertise matters less than experience with customer relationship management tools, monthly quota systems, and telling a brand's story.
- Now Salesforce has a better idea of what to look for in job candidates, instead of just guessing.
- Click here for more BI Prime content.
A few years ago, Salesforce ran an in-depth analysis of its best-performing employees across the globe.
The goal was to figure out exactly what distinguishes sales superstars from everyone else, and what clues the company should start looking for on résumés and in job interviews.
Salesforce is a cloud-technology giant that builds enterprise software, or tools to help companies connect with customers, partners, and employees. But when the results of the analysis rolled in, Salesforce HR was somewhat surprised to learn that enterprise-software expertise wasn't a prerequisite for a salesperson's success on the job.
Instead, according to Ana Recio, Salesforce's executive vice president of global recruiting, the most powerful predictors of success were experience with customer relationship management (CRM) tools - a core offering of Salesforce's - and monthly quota systems, as well as the ability to tell a brand's story.
Recio said Salesforce used these findings to create a list of ideal traits and skills for new hires.
Salesforce's experience running the analysis illustrates the importance of examining what makes a successful employee at your organization, as opposed to just taking an educated guess as to who's the best fit.
Salesforce conducts structured interviews to focus on the traits that actually matter in job candidates
Recio said the analysis showed that 40% of Salesforce's top-performing account executives did not have a background in enterprise software. "There had been a bias before [the analysis] that you had to have enterprise software experience in order to be successful at Salesforce," she added.
Beyond experience with customer relationship management tools and monthly quotas, many of the best sales people had previously gone through Sandler sales training. That's a popular methodology for teaching salespeople to engage potential customers. Sandler's clients include Salesforce, Accenture, Microsoft, and American Express, according to its website.
Sandler training focuses on "solution selling," Recio said, which Salesforce values highly. "It's about creating the larger narrative," she added.
Now that Salesforce knows what traits and skills predict success, the company is better equipped to conduct structured interviews, meaning every candidate for a specific role is assessed using the exact same questions.
"One of the major catalysts for creating a more structured interview process was to ensure that we were mitigating unconscious bias," Recio said. "Now we were creating an environment where all individuals felt like they were having a really objective experience."
Research suggests that structured interviews can help hiring managers avoid making biased decisions and find the best person for the job. That's in contrast to unstructured interviews, which are more freeform and encourage hiring managers to rely heavily on their intuition about who will thrive at the company.
Google uses structured interviewing in its hiring process, and has specific questions for interviewers to ask depending on the position they're hiring for.
In his 2011 bestseller, "Thinking, Fast and Slow," Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman advises hiring managers to pinpoint a handful of traits that are prerequisites for success in the position, write down questions that will assess each trait, and create a system for scoring the candidate's answers. To evaluate the candidate, Kahneman says to add up the scores, and to "firmly resolve that you will hire the candidate whose final score is the highest, even if there is another one whom you like better."
As for Salesforce, Recio said the analysis of top performers helped Salesforce craft a more effective hiring process. She added that job candidates are "truly being assessed on what makes them successful."