Here are some sobering SaaS sales recruitment stats.

• “A bad hire can cost up to 30% of the employee’s first-year earnings.”
• “Almost 75% of companies who made a bad hire reported an average of $17,000 in wasted money.”
• “80% of employee turnover results from bad hiring decisions.”

And here’s the kicker. 74% of SaaS sales recruiters say they’ve made a wrong hire at some point.

No matter how effective your SaaS sales recruitment seems, the chances are good that you’ll eventually choose the wrong person. If this happens consistently, it can have disastrous consequences for company growth and profitability.

To prevent unnecessary drama, I’m going to pinpoint practical steps you can take to avoid costly hiring mistakes to find the best of the best candidates who’ll stick with your SaaS company for the long haul.

Define Essential SaaS Salesperson Competencies

Before doing anything else, I suggest sitting down with key stakeholders and creating a concise list of core salesperson competencies that are essential to success. This should help you crystallize what’s truly important so you’ll know exactly what you’re looking for in a candidate.

Otherwise, it’s going to be difficult to articulate the type of candidate you’re looking for in a SaaS sales role.

There is a wide range of competencies that contribute to a SaaS salesperson thriving, but here are a few examples for reference.

Note that your list may change over time, and you can always make revisions as you accumulate more data. But having something concrete to start with should ensure a baseline level of candidate quality during recruiting.

Don’t Forget Cultural Fit

Besides the nuts and bolts of core competencies, you should always pay close attention to cultural fit. After all, you can hire someone who checks all the right boxes and is an absolute sales superstar. But if they’re a poor fit culturally, this will likely result in internal friction, premature turnover, and in many cases, money.

In fact, Forbes states that “the result of poor culture fit due to turnover can cost an organization between 50-60% of the person’s annual salary.”

On the other hand, SaaS companies that choose sales candidates that closely align with their culture see a revenue increase of 682%!

Whenever you’re posting a job ad, be sure to include which specific characteristics your ideal candidate should possess from a cultural standpoint. That alone, should help filter out a sizable percentage of poor fits. And during an interview, you can ask questions like these to gauge a person’s cultural fit.

Thoroughly Evaluate Hard and Soft Skills with the Right Tool

Once you have a firm grasp on the type of candidate you’re looking for, it’s time to develop a framework that allows you to objectively analyze candidates based on that criteria. As I mentioned earlier, you can get a fairly good sense of how qualified someone is during an interview.

However, this has its limitations, as you can’t always guarantee that a candidate will be 100% honest. Plus, unconscious bias is always a factor that can get in the way.

One of the best ways to properly evaluate hard and soft skills and truly see a candidate from all angles is to use SaaS sales recruiting software. A platform like HireDNA, for example, takes the guesswork out of the process and supplies you with data-driven insights on nearly every sales competency you can imagine.

Everything from sales experience to sales skills and abilities to role compatibility to cultural fit can be quantified with this tool to provide you with a holistic overview of a SaaS sales candidate.

Besides that, you can also gauge things like coachability, resilience, and emotional control, which, up until recently, have been quite difficult to measure.

At a glance, you can get an in-depth feel of how well a candidate would likely perform if hired and how they stack up against the competition. That way, you can easily narrow down the candidate pool to just a handful of A+ players before making your final decision.

Don’t Skimp on Onboarding

One final mistake I see many SaaS companies make is this. They go to the trouble of carefully identifying critical characteristics salespeople need to possess, perform comprehensive evaluations, and follow interviewing best practices to ultimately hire quality salespeople.

But their effort wanes after that.

During onboarding, they just go through the motions, where new reps only learn the basics and aren’t truly in a position to thrive. Then they’re surprised that a high percentage of reps fail to reach their potential, quit, or both.

My point here is that SaaS sales recruitment doesn’t stop once you’ve made a hire. An essential element is onboarding, where you go above and beyond to ensure each salesperson is equipped with everything they need to reach their full potential as quickly as possible.

For reference, here are a few things HubSpot suggests focusing on when training salespeople.

For a deeper dive, I highly recommend reading an article we wrote called The First 90 Days: A Blueprint for New Hire Retention Success. In it, we cover strategies like creating a welcome package, offering structured, phased onboarding, building internal relationships, and much more.

By following these techniques, you should be able to dramatically reduce ramp time and increase new hire retention.

Success Hinges on Talent: Optimizing Your SaaS Salesperson Recruitment

Given that nearly three-quarters of SaaS sales recruiters have botched a hire along the line, and hiring the wrong person can be incredibly costly, recruiting is a process that you want to get right. While perfection is hard to achieve, maximum optimization is fully within your grasp.

It’s just a matter of focusing on critical areas and refining your strategies. To recap, this includes defining essential SaaS salesperson competencies, not overlooking cultural fit, assessing hard and soft skills with a recruiting tool, and getting serious about onboarding.

If you’re ready to take the next step, try our Sales Skills Assessment to learn a candidate’s strengths and hidden weaknesses to make the best possible hiring decisions.