Companies try to hire one person to both find new business and manage existing accounts. However, few people excel at both. This leads them to gravitate towards one activity, resulting in either customer neglect (from too much hunting) or stagnant growth (from too much farming).
Instead of an initial filter, deploy assessments after you've decided you want to hire a candidate. This method serves as a crucial check on your own biases and reveals holes in your interview process that a polished interviewee might have exploited, helping you avoid a bad hire.
When desperate to fill a role, managers tend to dominate the interview conversation. This inadvertently gives skilled sales candidates all the information needed to mirror back the desired answers, creating a false sense of alignment and leading to poor hiring decisions.
Sales candidates easily handle generic 'how would you' questions. To get a true assessment, persistently ask for specifics: 'Tell me about a specific situation when...' If they give a general answer, repeat the question. This forces them beyond rehearsed responses to reveal actual experience.
Unlike large firms with HR support and buffer for mistakes, small companies are uniquely vulnerable in hiring. The intense pressure to fill a role often causes leaders to abandon processes and ignore red flags, leading to costly hiring errors that have a much larger relative impact.