Tag: soft skills

Why Soft Skills Matter More Than Ever in SaaS Sales Hiring

Posted on by Nick Mann

Product knowledge and industry expertise have been and always will be essential for SaaS sales success. But we’ve recently hit a tipping point where soft skills matter more than ever. In fact, some experts believe that they’ve actually usurped traditional hard skills and go further in closing deals.

For this post, I’ll break down the rationale behind the undeniable importance of soft skills and mention some specific traits to target when considering potential candidates.

The Buyer Now Does Most of the Research

In the past, buyers had limited information to go on when researching products and relied heavily on a salesperson’s input. But with the combination of search engines, social media, AI, and countless other digital resources, the vast majority of research is now done without talking to a rep.

This means that the modern SaaS buyer is more empowered than ever and is unlikely to simply take what a rep says at face value. Instead, they’re likely to have a barrage of questions and want to build a relationship with a rep before committing to a purchase.

Therefore, simply listing out a set of features and benefits just won’t cut it, especially in today’s hyper-competitive SaaS sales climate. Instead, a salesperson needs to possess critical soft skills like active listening, critical thinking, empathy, and clear communication to thrive. Also, it’s vital that they’re adaptive enough to tailor their sales pitch to the specific needs of each buyer to show how a product fits in with their unique workflows.

Skepticism is the New Norm for Modern SaaS Buyers

Besides being more empowered than ever, you could make the argument that the collective skepticism among today’s SaaS buyers is at an all-time high. This is largely due to the ease with which buyers can perform self-research, as well as many brands offering a lot of promises but failing to deliver in the long run.

Here’s some telling research that illustrates this current trend perfectly.

“Nearly three-quarters (73%) of buyers said they believe ‘most vendors fall short’ of the honesty mark. More specifically, when the survey asked, ‘To what extent do you feel technology vendors are being honest with you?’ here’s how the answers stacked up:

  • 27% said most vendors are honest most of the time;
  • 47% said most vendors strive to be honest but fall short;
  • 17% said some vendors strive to be honest but fall short;
  • 8% said vendors stretch the truth most of the time; and
  • 1% said vendors don’t know what the truth is.”

To break through the skepticism, salespeople need to take a consultative rather than an aggressive “buy now” approach, where they teach buyers how their SaaS product can practically benefit them and be comfortable with handling friction. It’s also important to back up claims with quantifiable evidence from testimonials and case studies, and have the finesse to build authentic rapport.

SaaS Sales Cycles Are Longer and More Complex Than Ever

First off, let me say that the SaaS sales cycle length can vary considerably from one company to another. A brand that’s selling a basic, relatively affordable SaaS product, for example, will likely have a shorter sales cycle than one that’s selling a robust, enterprise solution. With that said, HubSpot reports that the average SaaS sales cycle across the board is around 84 days.

Soft skills matter when navigating a lengthy SaaS sales cycle because a rep needs to build trust with a buyer (often with multiple stakeholders involved), actively listen to their needs, and identify the best solution based on key pain points.

In other words, a rep can’t just offer a demo, make the sale, and be done. They need to have the right soft skills to fluidly navigate a lengthy sales cycle and establish a genuine connection. Simply knowing the product inside and out just isn’t enough these days.

Much of SaaS Sales is Now Done Remotely or Hybrid

In a matter of months, COVID dramatically altered the workplace landscape, forcing record numbers of professionals in countless industries to work from home. And while many SaaS salespeople have returned to working in-house, a large number continue to work remotely or hybrid.

By the way, if you’re interested in the pros and cons of remote vs in-office SaaS sales teams, I suggest reading this article we wrote.

For perspective, a HubSpot study found that between July 2022 and July 2023, there was a 26% increase in the number of SaaS salespeople working hybrid to a total of 71%.

So what does this mean within the context of this article? It means that today’s SaaS salespeople need to be able to communicate effectively digitally, which can involve a variety of mediums, including email, phone, live chat, messenger, or video call.

While there may still be some face-to-face interaction, it’s never been more important for salespeople to be master digital communicators, where they nail the right tone, perfect their timing, understand “digital body language,” and generally have a high level of emotional intelligence. Besides that, they need to be adaptable enough to communicate with buyers across numerous mediums and cater to those with short attention spans.

A Recap of Why Soft Skills Matter

Again, I’m not trying to say that traditional hard skills like product knowledge and industry expertise are antiquated. They’ll always be important.

The core takeaway here is that we’ve recently hit a point where soft skills like active listening, critical thinking, empathy, clear communication, and adaptability have become just as if not more important than hard skills. For a SaaS salesperson to thrive in today’s competitive environment, they must possess these critical soft skills.

That’s why this should be a focal point when evaluating candidates, where you should put these types of soft skills front and center.

If you’re looking for a proven tool for identifying top-tier candidates, check out the Sales Skills Assessment. It provides in-depth insights into a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses and can help you build a more adept team of professionals with 95% accuracy.

89% of Recruiting Experts Say Bad Sales Hires Lack These Skills

Posted on by hiredna

Selecting salespeople based on hard skills is pretty straightforward. You see that a candidate clearly has the quantifiable abilities and experience required for a sales position, and often, you can easily verify it. Unfortunately, that’s not the case for the other type of skills I’ll discuss in this post — soft skills.

According to an in-depth study by LinkedIn, 89% of recruiting experts say there’s a common denominator between most bad sales hires. They lack the right soft skills.

LinkedIn’s Findings Behind Bad Sales Hires

In 2019, LinkedIn performed an exhaustive report where they surveyed over 5,000 talent professionals across 35 countries and analyzed comprehensive behavioral data. One of the primary areas they focused on was soft skills, as they found that it was the number one trend transforming the workplace that year. In fact, 91% of talent professionals agreed that soft skills were “very important” to the future of recruiting.

Going one step further, LinkedIn wanted to determine the impact soft skills had on the long-term success of candidates that were hired. And it turned out that the impact was quite immense, with their data finding a lack of soft skills to be a key contributor to most bad sales hires.

According to their findings, only 11% of recruiting experts said bad sales hires lack hard skills. However, 45% said they lack soft skills, and 44% said they lack both soft and hard skills. Put that all together, and 89% of recruiters said bad hires lack soft skills.

Why Soft Skills Are So Important in Sales

As you probably know, there is a wide range of factors that determine how successful someone is at selling. Obviously, having hard skills like product knowledge, knowing how to use a CRM, and performing sales demos is important. But this doesn’t always translate into success. To truly predict how good a candidate will be at their job, you need to see the big picture and also take soft skills into account.

Some examples include:

  • Collaboration
  • Communication
  • Rapport-building
  • Empathy
  • Quick problem-solving

Beyond that, it’s important for a salesperson to be nimble and think on their feet. You could even argue that having a certain level of likability is critical to building relationships and winning over customers. But there’s a problem.

Assessing Soft Skills is Notoriously Difficult

As I mentioned earlier, evaluating a candidate’s hard skills is fairly simple. A quick glance at their resume, for example, will usually give you a basic idea of what they bring to the table. You can also have them perform a test on their product knowledge, see how well they understand a particular business platform, perform a mock product demo, and so on.

“Identifying poor soft skills, however, is much harder, which is why they’re often discovered too late, after a hire has been made,” LinkedIn explains. “But as the data shows, bad hires are almost never a matter of hard skills alone.”

The main issue sales recruiters run into is that they lack a formal approach for assessing soft skills. In fact, 68% say they rely on basic behavioral questions or simply reading body language. “She seemed upbeat, so she’s probably a good collaborator; he seemed nervous, so he’s probably not a good leader. The problem is that these perceptions aren’t predictive, and worse, they’re often unconsciously biased.”

Given the inherent limitations of this commonly used approach, it’s unsurprising that so many sales recruiters struggle to accurately gauge soft skills in candidates. This brings me to my final point.

How to Effectively Evaluate Soft Skills

Given how tricky it’s been historically, how exactly should you go about assessing soft skills in sales candidates?

Here’s a four-step system that I feel is highly effective:

  1. Identify essential soft skills – Pinpoint four or five specific skills that are a must for being a successful salesperson at your company and make them a top priority when recruiting.
  2. Leverage assessment tools – Back in the day, recruiters had to primarily rely on behavioral cues and body language, but now there are several objective tools like eSkill and Pymetrics that can provide you with quantifiable data. eSkill, for instance, allows you to measure emotional intelligence to ensure candidates have a high level of communication and collaboration.
  3. Be aware of unconscious bias – LinkedIn found that unconscious bias often gets in the way of recruiters assessing candidates. You may, for example, be inclined to like a particular candidate because they have a similar personality as you. But keeping this in mind can help steer you away from this issue.
  4. Standardize your interview process – “Train interviewers to ask a standard set of questions suited to the skills you’re targeting. This allows you to easily compare evaluations, even if they’re done by different interviewers.”

Beyond that, many companies can benefit from using a sales recruiting platform like HireDNA. It uses science-based assessments that look at core selling competencies like motivation, desire, and coachability to predict success and can quantify what used to be unquantifiable.

Avoiding Bad Sales Hires

Having the right mix of hard and soft skills is critical to making good hires and building a strong team of salespeople. Unfortunately, the latter is more difficult to evaluate and has created a consistent problem for many brands over the years. Further, nearly 9 out of 10 recruiting experts say bad hires lack soft skills.

While assessing soft skills will, admittedly, always be trickier than assessing hard skills, it’s certainly possible. And the four-step process outlined above should help.

To learn more about HireDNA and how it can dramatically improve your sales recruiting, reach out to us today. 92% of candidates recommended through this platform become top performers within a year.