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The best sales reps aren’t scrolling job boards. They’re too busy closing deals, breaking records, and getting treated like gold. If you’re waiting for them to apply, you’ll lose to the companies who are already in their inbox. When we built our first sales team, every top performer came from outbound recruiting - not inbound applicants.
Here’s exactly how we found, sold, and hired the top 1% reps who took us from $0 to $M ARR.
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SALES
The 4-step process we used to recruit elite sellers
The best sales reps are never looking for a new gig.
The top reps in any organization are often treated like gold. And if they are looking, they're usually starting with their warm network and already have a shortlist of opportunities.
It's far easier to outbound your next top 1% rep than to wait for them to show up.
I outbounded my first 4 hires as Pave's VP of Sales and plucked the exact ICP for the culture I wanted to build. And those first 5 set the gold standard for every rep we hired from $0 to $10M ARR.
Here’s the process I took to find them:
Develop your candidate ICP
Outbound 25-50 reps per week
Turn your entire company into sourcers
Understand the rep before grilling them
Let's roll.
1: Develop your candidate ICP
Step 1 is to define your sales rep ICP. It's going to be different depending on the stage of your company, but here are the three things that I looked for:
Match stage to stage. I was looking for reps who sold in the growth stages (Series C-F) because they still saw a glimpse of the early stage scrappiness, but they saw some semblance of scale so they weren't learning by complete trial and error.
Match sales cycle to sales cycle. I was hiring mid-market AEs, so I DQ'd any reps doing super quick turn one call closes or massive 6-month sales cycles. They had to be both consultative, but also be able to find and juggle 10-20 opportunities.
Look for acceleration. I was looking for quick promotions, high attainment or stack rank, or past club appearances. Are they top of the pack?
For me, everything else was either [a] something I would test for or [b] a nice-to-have, including industry experience.
2: Outbound 25-50 Reps Per Week
Yeah, you want your reps to prospect?
YOU DO IT TOO, BUD!
Every week, I would use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find 25-50 reps that fit my profile per week and sent them a simple 3 step drip:
Step 0: A blank connection request
Step 1: A 3x3 message
Step 2: A bubble-up message ("Any thoughts?")
Step 3: A recap message ("3-4 things about the team, know anyone else looking?"
3: Turn your entire company into recruiters
The reality is you can only reach out to so many people and you only know so many people. So take the principles from the outbound process above and scale them across your entire company:
Give your recruiters sourcing quotas. Have them send inmails from your inbox and they'll get significantly higher reply rates than when they send messages themselves. Then, I put them on a "steak dinner" quota and took my sourcer out for a fancy steak dinner when she booked over 75 screens in a single month.
Put your reps on sourcing quotas. 25-30% of my hires came from these sessions. Get your team together for a 60-minute lunch meeting -- you're not allowed to leave until you put 10 reps you know in the spreadsheet and show me that you reached out to them.
Ask other sellers for 2nd degree referrals. Ask all of your best sales friends (that you're not trying to hire yourself) if they know someone who's looking. Same deal here -- put a number to ask 25 people for referrals. You will get referrals.
You can do it. Your recruiters can do it. Your team can do it.
There is no excuse.
4: Sell Before You Grill
For outbound candidates, it's critical that you run the 1st interview differently from a traditional 1st round screen because they aren't sold yet.
If you come in and just start grilling them, you're going to totally put them off. So you need to do a combination of selling and evaluating.
Here are the 4 steps to my outbound interview framework:
The Mini Pitch: I give them a brief overview of why I reached out to them, why I felt they'd be a good fit for the team, and how we were going to build that baddest sales team out there.
Dig in on their goals: Just like in a discovery call, I want to know why they took the call because they don't take every recruiter screen that comes their way. If I get the sense that they aren't thrilled with their current gig, I'll ask what they'd want in another one. If not, I'll still dig in on why the heck they took the call, then try to understand their broader career goals.
Sell-valuate questions Once I've spent 10 minutes on them, I try to ask 2-3 high level questions that give them chance to brag and give me a chance to evaluate them. I'll say "you seem like you've had a ton of success..." and then ask a purposely high level question like "how do you sell?" or "what's your sales process?" and see if they're able to give me a moderately coherent answer.
The turnaround pitch: And if I like them, I ask for permission to grill them in a proper interview: “Honestly, Nick, I jump on a lot of these calls. 9/10 times, the candidate’s not a fit. But I think you may just have the profile to really be successful here. I know you said you’re not looking, but I feel like it might make sense to ask you if you'd even consider going through a formal interview process with us.”
You sold your team upfront. You understood their goals. You evaluated them a bit.
And then you sold em again.
And if you do all this right... NOW you have earned the right to grill a top 1% rep.
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That's a wrap folks!
HEADLINES
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SOFTWARE
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That’s all for today.
Until next time,
Team B2B Whales
P.S. If you’re serious about scaling, join our Whales Club - our premium B2B community with weekly expert sessions, deal feedback, and the resources we actually use to close. Membership starts at $100/month only - cancel anytime.