The Three Questions #9 - Mafalda Johannsen - Sales Recruitment

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☝️First things first

It's been a while! I know that, but it was for a good reason: I was traveling in Italy for a team offsite and then to Spain to take care of The Sales Gang expansion there. And it was great! Italy is always nice, we were between Torino and Genova, and besides eating really well, we had the chance to meet amazing people and places. And in Spain, it was no different, we are indeed going to operate more actively in the Spanish market, with more news to be announced soon.

Starting with an interesting prediction from the latest LinkedIn report:

"While most in-house corporate recruiting professionals believe their overall recruiting budget will stagnate or decrease this year, an ever larger share (60%) believe their employer branding budget will increase."

Interesting to see this in this report, we are already feeling it on the ground, companies are hiring less, or taking more time to make a decision, and on the other hand more concerned about how attractive they are for the talent they want to onboard.

Aside, the frequent poll that I and some other talent content producers here on Linkedin are doing for a while, shows that the recession might not be influencing smb's that hard:

And indeed, more people are applying for jobs, so maybe this could explain why companies are taking more time to hire, as the latest pulse from workable shows:

So yes, the market is a bit crazy. And I won't be repeating everything you´ve read about the SVB or the Chatgpt-4. Let's keep up the hard work and have fun at the same time: “the future will tell.”

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🤟 Three Questions - Featuring  Mafalda Johannsen  - Sales Recruitment

0. Could you share a short bio? (just a small paragraph about you!)

Named after a cartoon ("Mafalda" from Quino), I've been working in sales for quite some time in different countries (USA, Belgium, and Germany) and for different industries (media, tourism, SaaS, sales). Currently, I work as a Business Development & Customer Success Director for Wonderway (a sales training & performance platform), and I also host “A day In a life of a Persona” podcast, where I interview buyer personas to understand their priorities and challenges. In my free time, I’m the Marketing & PR Manager for a Portuguese Jazz Fusion band called Plasticine.

1. Mafalda, Wonderway is a german sales training saas. It seems there's an increase in tech sales boot camps and tools in Europe. How do you think the sales career and technology evolved in the past years, and could you point out any trends?

Let’s zoom out for a second: Sales have been evolving quite rapidly. A couple of years ago, reps would follow the so-called “pray and spray” approach, they wouldn’t do a proper follow-up, they would go for a “quantity over quality” kind of tactic, etc. A very transactional approach, I would say. Then, we started to see sales trainers and advocates promoting more structured and targeted strategies, and the rise of live conferences and content marketing. 

Covid hit and sales teams had to step up their game once again: from video prospecting to direct mail campaigns, LinkedIn, Social Selling, personalization and relevance, "caring about the prospect's mindset, you name it! Now, we face another challenge (the recession) and it’s all about sales efficiency, pre-qualified leads, and very targeted prospecting."

As we can see, the market is competitive and sellers are always encountering new challenges. Breaking through the noise requires a lot of adaptation and this is where sales boot camps and SaaS tools come in: Sales Boot Camps can help sales reps and sales managers learn about sales techniques and methodologies, put theory into practice, and network as well. They don’t replace software like Wonderway, though. I would say they complement each other. Boot Camps are something you do here and there, whereas tools, on the other hand, should be used on a weekly basis, if not daily. They are meant to make sales processes and training more efficient by saving time for sales managers and sales enablers, providing relevant data to make the right decisions, and supporting sales reps from onboarding to continuous learning. 

2. What do you think are the traits of good sales professionals? How could a recruiter know if a sales candidate is a match, without knowing a lot about sales techniques, frameworks, etc.?

For senior sales roles, experience is definitely required, but for junior sales positions, my favorite candidates are the ones with no sales experience since they don’t come with bad habits (they die hard!), and I can train them properly from scratch. This works because we, being a sales training tool, are very into training and continuous coaching. Obviously, this doesn’t apply if the company doesn’t provide a proper onboarding and doesn’t invest time in training their sales reps (which it’s definitely not recommendable!). If that’s the case, they are better off hiring someone who has done the job before. The sales reps would still need training, but it would be less catastrophic than hiring someone without any clue about the job and not training them.

These are the traits I always look for in a candidate: 1. Organized/time management skills; 2. Proactive 3. Curious 4. Open to feedback. Everything else can be taught, in my opinion. Consistency is key in sales, and that’s why you need strong time management skills. As mentioned above, sales and business, in general, evolve quite rapidly, so you need to be proactive in order to keep up with the trends and find new ways of prospecting when your tactics are not working out. As for curiosity, that’s a very important skill when it comes to researching and knowing more about your prospect. Last but not least, you must be open to constructive feedback in order to improve yourself, otherwise, you’ll keep making the same mistakes over and over again. 

This is how we, at Wonderway, try to assess these skills:

1. Organized/time management skills - we still haven’t figured it out yet, and I would love to get some input here!

2. Proactiveness - this is easy to assess. Has the candidate followed up with you? Did the candidate go beyond what was asked in the interview task? When I hired one of our CS managers, he finished the task way before the deadline to prove to me that he was efficient and he cared about the position. Guess what? I hired him and he’s a top performer. 

3. Curiosity - I usually assess this skill by the questions they ask during the interview process. If the candidate didn’t prepare any questions, that’s a red flag. If they prepared pertinent questions about the company, that’s a sign they know how to research and understand how a company works, which is crucial in sales.

4. Open to Feedback -  as a first step of the recruitment process, we have a task that includes writing an e-mail, recording a short video, and other small assessments related to the job. I usually give feedback in the follow-up interview and I see how the candidate responds to it: did she/he get defensive? Did she/he apply the feedback in the next step of the process?

3. What is the ideal recruitment process for salespeople (SDR's) and then, and how could the onboarding make a difference in their performance?

I’m pretty happy with the recruitment process we do here at Wonderway: 1. Assessment 2. Interview with me (Director of Business Development) and 3. Final interview with the CEO which includes a cold call role-play. Three steps are more than enough, in my opinion. I personally dislike 6 steps recruitment process, especially for junior positions. More often than not, I already know who I want to hire on the first step, and I’m right most of the time. 

An efficient onboarding process is crucial to set up people for success, and that’s actually our specialty here at Wonderway! I can share some of our best practices and common mistakes we usually see:

1. All of the content on the onboarding needs to be relevant to the job: If it’s just an “FYI” or a “nice to learn”, then don’t add it to your training. Learners are exposed to a lot of content, and they need to learn and absorb all of it. If you mix relevant content with no-so-relevant one, they don’t know which one to prioritize as they’ll assume that everything has the same level of importance, and they won’t retain everything.
2. The time between learning and applying the content should be as short as possible: A common mistake we see is that learners go through the content way before they need to use it. For example, let’s say that, in the first week, the newbie has a session on how to use the CRM but he/she will only use the tool for the first time four weeks later. This is problematic for two reasons: 1) If they don't apply the knowledge right away, they will forget about it and will need to be re-trained later on; 2) If they don’t understand why they need the training for, they are less motivated to learn and absorb information.
3. Small blocks of content with a practical assignment: In order for the learner to process and retain information, it’s important to provide him/her with small pieces of content followed by an assessment. Like this, there are fewer things to remember at a time, and the learner can apply the learnings right away. In addition to that, not only the content needs to be tied to the expected goal, but also the assessment should match the outcome. For example, if you’re teaching the learner how to use a tool, then ask him/her to perform the “screen recording” assessment that shows whether they can use the tool properly or not. It doesn’t make sense to ask the learner to answer a multiple-choice quiz about a software if the end goal is for the learner to use it on a daily basis. Another example is pitching: If you would like to check if the learner knows how to pitch your product, a “video recording” is the best way to assess it since you can check if she/he understood the product and the problem that it solves as well as if his/her tone, confidence, and understandability are on point.
4. Set up goals along the way so the learner knows why is he/she learning the content: It’s important that learners understand what’s expected of them so they also see why they are being trained on certain skills and knowledge. For example, if the learner has the goal of making 20 cold calls in week 2, she/he will understand why the training for the first 2 weeks is about the product, persona, and cold calling techniques. Last but not least, it’s important to have soft KPIs in the first weeks of onboarding so you can detect performance issues right away and act on them before it’s too late.

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