Industry Experience Is The Most Overrated Line On A Sales Resume
A client of ours hired a guy for a sales role in an industry he’d never worked in.
Zero experience in the space. None. Nada. Zilch.
He’d been selling something completely different. The hiring committee wasn’t sure about him. The other finalists had ten years in the industry, the right contacts, the right vocabulary. He had none of it.
But his sales-specific assessment was off the charts. Strong desire. High commitment. The kind of hunting wiring you can’t fake and can’t teach.
We told the client to hire him.
It took about ninety days for him to stop sounding like a tourist on calls. Six months in, he was outperforming reps who’d been in the industry for years.
You can teach an industry. You can teach a product. Ninety days of focused work and a smart person catches up on the vocabulary, the regulatory landscape, the competitive map.
You cannot teach someone to pick up the phone. You cannot teach someone to ask hard questions about money, sit in silence after a tough question, or follow up a fifth time when the prospect has gone dark. Those things are wiring. They show up on assessments. They don’t show up on resumes.
We’ve watched companies do the opposite of what our client did. They hire the candidate with twelve years in the industry and the impressive logos. Six months in, the new hire isn’t producing. A year in, they’re still not producing. Eighteen months in, the company finally lets them go. Total cost is north of $400k in salary alone. The opportunity cost of a year and a half of lost pipeline is much bigger.
The math on a bad sales hire isn’t the salary. It’s the quota that didn’t get filled. Multiply that by however many seats you’re carrying, and the number gets ugly fast.
Industry experience is easy to hire. Sales DNA is not.
So when you look at your roster, ask who’s actually wired for the job you’re asking them to do. Not who has the most relevant background. Who has the wiring?
If they don’t have it, no amount of training will get it there.
How We Hire Salespeople For Our Clients
When companies bring us in to recruit, we don’t start with sourcing. We start with the role itself.
A lot of the time, the job description is generic. The 90 day plan doesn’t exist. The comp plan hasn’t been pressure tested. We won’t recruit into that. Dropping a strong hire into an undefined role is how good people fail.
Once that’s clean, we run sales-specific assessments before any interview happens. Not personality tests. Assessments built for sales. Desire, commitment, outlook, hunting DNA, money tolerance, qualifying ability. If a candidate doesn’t score on the competencies the role demands, we don’t interview them. The resume doesn’t matter.
The reason we work this way is that we’re operators. We’ve sat in the seat. We’ve hired wrong, gotten beat up by a board, and had to clean it up. Our lens is whether this hire helps you grow or gets you fired.
If you’re staring at a seat that needs to get filled, or one that’s filled by the wrong person, reach out here and tell me what you’re working on. We’ll tell you whether recruiting is what you actually need, or whether something has to get fixed first.
Adam
