Are You Ready to Grow or Looking for a Hero?
The Myth of The Outlier
In Malcolm Gladwell’s record-breaking bestseller, Outliers, he demonstrated that the one commonality to be found among the greatest success stories is readiness. Success is fruit from a tree that needs the right conditions. Gladwell explores elite Canadian hockey players, Bill Gates, The Beatles and even elite pilots, uncovering how we often mistakenly attribute success stories to individual brilliance. The complete story behind individual brilliance includes the fertile conditions from which high performance can grow.
Building a successful sales team is similar and it pays to understand this before deciding what kind of sales person you need to hire.
How to Build a Sales Team That Actually Delivers Growth
Every growing company reaches a moment when the idea of scaling through a stronger sales force becomes impossible to ignore. It is an exciting thought: more people on the phones, more meetings booked, more deals closed. But the question that often gets lost in the rush is not who to hire, but how ready you are as a company to hire for growth.
Adding great sales people does not automatically translate into results. The wrong hire, or the right hire brought into the wrong environment, can slow progress rather than accelerate it. Building a sales team is a test of readiness, the companies that succeed do not just post job adverts. They prepare the ground for success long before the first interview takes place and they have a self-aware plan for making that hire a long-term success.
When a business decides it is time to expand its sales force, they are about to expose their culture, strategy and leadership to the scrutiny of sales candidates who are open to a new challenge. The best candidates can see through inconsistency. They will hear it in how the Chief Executive talks about the future, how the hiring manager defines the mission, and how the compensation plan rewards performance. What’s worse is that poor candidates cannot detect such inconsistencies and want to come on board!
Growth begins with aligning your readiness with the capability and experience of your desired candidates.
Alignment at the Top
When the leadership team is misaligned, even the most talented salespeople will struggle to perform. Misalignment often hides behind enthusiasm, the sense that everyone agrees growth is good, even if no one agrees on what it looks like.
Before a single offer is made, leaders need to agree on what kind of sales function they are building. Are they targeting enterprise accounts or retail sales? Are they hunters or farmers? Does the growth plan depend on market expansion or deeper account penetration?
Good sales candidates need clarity on these factors. When leadership teams speak with one voice, the message cascades cleanly into the hiring process. When they do not, new recruits inherit confusion where they were once attracted to opportunity.
What do we need to grow?
How easy is it to sell our proposition to the market? What type of candidate can be successful in our environment? The more mature and planned the environment, the less capability and experience needed in the hire. The answers to these questions should be the same for all leaders in the business.
Culture as a sales strategy
Culture plays a quieter but equally powerful role in determining whether a business can attract high-performing salespeople. The culture that builds successful delivery and gold-standard recruiting processes is not always the same culture that attracts great people.
Sales people who are already on the road to the Hall of Fame are unlikely to need or want to be told what to do or how to do it. They typically want a great service to sell in a firm they can make a significant impact. They are often drawn to environments that move fast, celebrate results and trust individuals to do their job without micromgmt. A company that values stability higher than new ideas will rarely appeal to this type of sales person.
There is no single ideal culture for sales, but there must be a clear match. The key question is not whether your culture is “good”, but whether it fits the type of people you want to hire. If you want ambitious, entrepreneurial salespeople, your culture must offer autonomy and reward initiative. If you want consultative, relationship-driven sellers, the organization must show patience and respect for long-term value creation.
In the eyes of a candidate, culture is not a slogan on a careers page, it is a mirror that reflects what your business truly rewards.
What compensation reveals
Compensation tells candidates more about your company than any employer brand statement ever could. It signals what you value and can offer hints to the maturity of your business processes in this area.
A business that underpays on commission communicates caution. One that overpays can risk signaling desperation. The balance lies in designing a compensation scheme that rewards the behaviors you want to see, not just the outcomes you hope for. A good/fair commission plan in one company may become an underpaying plan in a less organized company where the sales person is fighting a harder battle.
Is the commission structure clear and achievable? Does it reward excellence and/or protect against underperformance? Are top performers genuinely able to earn at the level their skill deserves? When the answers to these questions are yes, compensation becomes more than a financial lever. It becomes an alignment tool, linking personal motivation directly to company success.
Compensation for sales people should be a fair reflection of the challenge and work effort required to win business. If you need a sales person who can do it all on their own, give them a bigger piece of the pie. If you have a system that can almost run itself, you can hire more junior candidates motivated by learning as well as compensation and pay less as a result. Just be careful to right-fit your commission plan.
Hiring as a reflection of the business
The hiring process itself often reveals more about a company’s readiness than anything else. In many ways, it is the first sales pitch, not to a customer but to the market.
Sales candidates are, by nature, evaluators. They notice how quickly you respond, how organized your interview process is, and whether each conversation builds a consistent story about opportunity and vision. A slow, fragmented or overly procedural hiring process can send a confused signal that indicates disorganization behind the scenes.
If you expect sales excellence, your hiring process must model it. That means clarity at every stage, respect for candidates’ time and decisiveness when it matters. A well-run process gives top performers confidence that they are joining an organization that operates at their level. A poor one drives them elsewhere, usually to competitors.
The reality of readiness
Before you scale your sales force, it is worth pausing to ask a few grounding questions.
Are your leaders genuinely aligned on strategy and vision?
Is your culture capable of attracting the kind of people you need?
Is your compensation plan competitive enough to win in your market?
And can your hiring process reliably close the caliber of talent you need?
The businesses that grow most successfully through sales hiring are the ones that answer yes to all four. They recognize that recruitment is not a quick fix but an extension of their strategy.
Growth is not triggered by the arrival of new people. It is enabled by the environment that greets them. When that environment is aligned, ambitious and well-prepared, the sales force you build will not only generate revenue but multiply your company’s potential.