Why Your Sales Hiring Keeps Failing (And How To Fix It)

Sales hiring is fundamentally broken, costing companies an average of $380,000 per bad hire while drastically reducing runway. Instead of using empirical data, most go-to-market teams are still gambling on gut-feel interview decisions and outdated job descriptions. This forces organizations into a vicious cycle of replacing up to half of their new hires within the first 90 days. To break this cycle, revenue leaders must start by profiling their existing top performers to build a precise 'blueprint' of what success looks like. This means evaluating reps quantitatively on velocity metrics, behaviorally on core beliefs and personality, and operationally through a clear capability matrix. Only when leaders truly understand the DNA of their A-players can they effectively align with Talent Acquisition to hire the right profiles. As AI continues to disrupt the high-velocity SDR model, the demand for strategic, technical, and highly resilient account executives is skyrocketing. Companies that adapt by prioritizing proven behavioral traits like resilience over flashy but irrelevant past performance will be the ones that de-risk their hiring process and consistently hit their revenue targets.

Discussed in this episode

The true cost of a bad sales hire averages $380,000 for quota-carrying AEs.
A major disconnect exists between what sales leaders want and what talent acquisition brings them.
Past performance is an overrated metric because an A-player in SMB won't necessarily succeed in enterprise.
Building a high-performance hiring blueprint starts with evaluating your existing successful reps.
High-performer blueprints require three layers: quantitative metrics, behavioral data, and capability frameworks.
Sales culture alignment serves as a strong leading indicator of individual quota attainment.
AI is shifting demand away from entry-level SDRs toward highly technical, consultative enterprise sellers.
Frontline managers are currently facing a coaching crisis, negatively impacting rep development.

Episode highlights

0:00 — The staggering cost of a bad sales hire
4:15 — Why sales hiring models are fundamentally broken
7:30 — The disconnect between leadership and TA teams
10:15 — Starting your blueprint with existing top performers
12:30 — Mapping quantitative and behavioral data points
16:00 — The crucial role of sales culture alignment
19:45 — How AI is demanding technical expertise in AEs
24:00 — Why past performance is highly overrated
25:30 — Resilience and the frontline management crisis

Key takeaways

A single bad sales hire costs an average of $380,000.
Stop hiring based on gut feelings; use data-backed scorecards.
Build a hiring blueprint by analyzing your current top performers.
AI fluency and technical expertise are becoming mandatory AE skills.
Resilience is a far better predictor of success than past performance.

Transcript

One of the key things pain points we're seeing in the market at the moment is the disconnect between what leadership teams want to hire for and what talent acquisition are bringing them. Everyone likes to say that measuring activity is bullshit. And while generally speaking, I don't think with AEs you want to sit and measure activity all day. We always advocate for beginning, begin with your existing team.

If you don't understand what great looks like across your current team, it's very, very hard, if not impossible, to go and hire and and replicate. Welcome back to another episode of the Bridge the Gap podcast powered by Revenue Reimagine. Today's guest is Matt Milligan, co-founder of UHubs, which is a platform designed to help revenue leaders derisk their sales hiring and build winning teams using get this y'all, data. Math's mission is to fix one of the biggest drains and go to market, hiring sales people who don't fit, don't produce and cost the company months of runway.

We talk about this all the time. Through UHubs, he's giving leaders the tools to hire smarter, coach better and keep reps performing longer. We're going to talk about what companies get wrong in sales hiring and what data and development can finally get it right. And we might talk a little pick ball too.

Matt, welcome to the show. Thanks Adam. Yeah, um, Dale wasn't kidding when he said you uh, you do a good intro. It's the only reason I'm here, man.

It's the only reason I'm here. Yeah, thanks thanks for having me guys. Really, really good to see you both and uh, looking forward to the conversation today. Yeah, no, it was uh, it was great catching up at Inbound.

Um, you know, one of the things I want to start off with is when you go to events or things that you're doing that other people are around, like Matt and I probably would have never connected if it wasn't for a little pickball session. Um, and so go out, do the events, like get out in the places, people talk about how there's like no ROI in events, but it's only how much effort you put into them, is that you get out of them. So, um, so some of those things are are super important. And um, with that, one of the things that Matt Matt and I talked about while we're playing some pickball, while we're educating the rest of the the court on on how to play proper pickball, um, was really on on bad sales hires and and we see this all the time.

It costs so much money to have a bad sales hire, all the way from the leader into individual contributors, could actually at a startup uh organization could completely derail everything that you're doing. Um, so you say you say that most companies are are gambling on sales hires. What does the gamble really cost these these companies organizations with these bad hires? You know, it's a great question, Dale.

There's been a number of studies done on the cost of an an unsuccessful sales hire. Um, the the one that I hang hang my hat on and tend to reference the most, um, was was done by Salesforce. So Salesforce did a bunch of research looking into this within their own organization. Um, I I mean I I'll throw it over to you guys.

Like if you guys do would get were to guess, like what would you guess the average cost of an unsuccessful sales hire is? Are we talking AE, BDR, VP of sales? I mean, it it doesn't matter. It ballpark 75 to $150,000.

Like a lot of money. A full a full year of someone's salary if not more. Um, and that's not even counting what you're losing in customer growth and sales and everything else. That's just what I would say like hard cost.

I'm going to guess you're going to tell me I'm way under. Dale, what do you reckon? I I think it's probably half to three quarters of a million dollars. Yeah, so so Dale, you were closer.

So Salesforce looked at an average of their their codes to carrying AEs, which obviously includes SMB all the way through to enterprise. So 380,000 K, which like that's that's an insane cost for the business, right? So we do a lot of work, just for context for the listeners, our our customer base, our exclusively venture backed or private equity backed software companies. So we do a lot of work with organizations that are going one way through another through transformation.

Um, and often times it means that, you know, new chief revenue officer has come in either for the first time or has come in and replaced an org that that's struggling. Um, one of our customers, um, we we did a calculation like an ROI calc before working with them. We calculated that it was costing their business five and a half million dollars per year in unsuccessful sales hires. So it's it's How many how many sales hires was that?

Five and a half million when you were calculating it out? It's a high velocity business, so they they do have a lot of, uh, you know, they hire a lot. They they obviously lose a lot. They their first 90-day attrition rate was 48%.

So one in every two of every sales hires they were making, they were losing within the first 90 days. Now, was that was that the AEs leaving or was that the company firing them? It it was a a combination of regrettable attrition, um, as well as performance management. Um, but it was mostly joiners leaving.

I mean, we've we're all sales guys, right? We know the drill that if you're in the role and you don't think it's going anywhere, we tend to be the ones to jump ship first, right? But I think the that the the craziness is that in in lots of lots of areas of the market that we work in, there's kind of this acceptance of these crazy statistics, right? And there's kind of like this just universal acknowledgement that this is just the way it is and it's always been like this, and you have the revolving door and as long as you just kind of keep keep hiring and you keep the keep investing in talent acquisition, then you'll get your way through it.

But it's bonkers. Like, guys, come on. This is like 2025. It's crazy that we're still trying to build go-to-market teams with this with this broken model.

Um, and if you look at, you know, the CEOs I spend time with, I was at an event, um, I was back in London last week for an event with like the UK Chancellor was there, right? I was talking with like 25 of the top CEOs in the country and they wouldn't accept that low ROI on product investments. Like if they're building a product team, you wouldn't have one in two product hires fail in the first 90 days. Um, but for some reason in sales, like we kind of, um, over the years have have accepted it, but I think things are changing.

So, you know, there's there's a recognition across go-to-market leaders that I'm working with that we have to get more efficient. We have to fix the broken model and we have to get smarter about the teams that we're building and and how we're enabling them. Those numbers, like you you just threw out some numbers that are pretty, pretty astounding, right? Um, and pretty, pretty sad.

Um, that people are spending and losing that kind of money. Where like where's the first breakdown? And I know that's a very broad question, but like why is part of my friends, but like why is this so fucked? Because this this is brutal.

Yeah, it is. It is. Um, so look, I I think part of part of this problem, if you unpack the problem, it comes down to a few things. I think one of those factors which is often overlooked is candidate suitability to the role.

So, and what I mean by that is a seller that could be an an A player in one company that's selling a say a smaller deal size, high volume, um, high velocity sales motion. They may have absolutely killed it in their previous role and now they're trying to make the step up to enterprise. It doesn't mean that they're going to step in and become a successful enterprise seller. I think this is one of the kind of key issues that we see in the market is just because you've been successful in in one patch, running certain types of deals with a brand behind you, definitely doesn't mean that you can step in and overnight take that success with you.

So I think about it as like players in different positions, right? In sports teams. Selling different products in different organizations is is like playing a different position. And we need to get much smarter in how we're thinking about the talent profiles that we're bringing in and just because someone's got a CV that says they've been a president's club, you know, six quarters in a row, um, I I the common mishap I see is that talent acquisition teams and and hiring managers just aren't spending enough time to truly understand the profile of the individual that they need to bring into their organization.

So I say that that's step one. And obviously we we can go deeper there if if you want. I think obviously the next step of that is then like once you have the candidate in C, how do you make them productive as quickly as possible? And those first 30, 60, 90 days are just so crucial as you guys know all too well.

We we I mean, there's just so much improvements that can be made in in that onboarding experience. I actually you you go ahead, Dale. I I actually think that it starts kind of what you were saying, like the hiring the hiring recruiting group, whatever you're doing, doesn't uh know what they're hiring for. They don't set realistic expectations.

The hiring manager is pretending to understand or maybe has an old job description that they're just rebuilding because the company's ICP is changing, their buying personas are changing, so if they have an old JD, just like if you have an old ICP, like that's not working. If things aren't working on that hire, how do you take that data and push it back into the JD? Like what is the problem that's happening with the JD? That's just the the start of it.

And then it's like all of the interview, like I I look at interview questions, I'm like these are the worst interview questions ever. Like what are you going to get out of that question? Like every question you ask should have a reason for it. And then no one's doing a scorecard, so you don't know who's good or bad.

And then you just then you bring them on board and then there's zero process to the onboarding. Like when we work And let let's let's let's couple with that that you're we're talking about sales hires at the moment and what are sales people really good at, y'all? Selling themselves. They're good at bullshitting.

Like and most people aren't doing the proper background I I don't want to say background checks, but the proper checks at all. Like I can tell you I'm a six-time president's club winner. I can like I'm a seller. I can sell myself.

How are you validating this to make sure it's the right person and not just like listen, Dale does this all the time, right? Dale gets on the phone with me and tells me how how effing great he is. And then I'm like prove it, dude, show me. Like show me something.

I I'm kidding. Dale's great. 100%. I and I think there's a couple of interesting things that came out of what you both just said there.

I think one is we see a lot of disconnect. Again, this depends on the size of the organization, right? But again, for context, most of the organizations we're working with, VC private equity backed, you you typically got at least kind of 25 in your go-to-market team. And often times you will have in-house talent acquisition as well.

One of the key things pain points we're seeing in the market at the moment is the disconnect between what leadership teams want to hire for and what talent acquisition are bringing them in terms of profile. Like I I hear this so many times at the moment. So I think there's a there's a misalignment between in-house teams just trying to fill the quota and just trying to bring, make sure you've got enough reps to hit the number versus like what leaders are actually looking for and I actually think that there's a pretty small, you know, the talent pool is not infinite, right? The war for talent is real for those truly elite candidates that fit the profile that that you're after.

I think the second thing to build on what Dale was saying around how your ICP, your go-to-market is shifting, I think that's true of pretty much any organization in the market right now. You know, no matter what stage you're at, no matter where you're based geographically, everyone is having to rethink their go-to-market, right? AI is having huge impacts on on how we think about go-to-market strategy, and that is impacting the team structure. So I'm seeing a lot of my customers completely rethinking what is their team structure need to look like moving forwards?

You know, does that mean removing SDR entirely and actually looking to automate automate a lot of outbound? Does it mean that we need to go for a more experienced profile of seller who can ramp a bit quicker, who can come in and hit the ground, um, more quickly? Um, and just the final piece I'd I'd add on this is it's crazy that for so long we've been making these expensive recruitment decisions based on gut feel. And to your point, Adam, like sales people are so good at selling themselves.

So the hiring manager, you know, comes away from the interview process thinking, yeah, this is our guy or this is our girl. And actually there's no data being used in this decision making process at all in most instances, which is which is pretty crazy. Zero. So when you when you shift gears and you're looking at data, like where where do you start?

Where where where should leaders start? You start with with your existing team, Adam. So, you know, in most organizations that are post-product market fit, you will have what we often call a blueprint. So you'll have some leading indicators, some evidence of sellers that are proving the model works that are consistently and repeatedly hitting quota.

We always advocate for beginning, begin with your existing team. If you don't understand what great looks like across your current team, it's very, very hard, if not impossible, to go and hire and and replicate, uh, what what great looks like. If you don't understand, um, what great looks like. I think it was Yogi Beara that said, if you don't know where you're headed, you'll probably end up somewhere else.

And I think that's super accurate within go-to-market hiring as well. So step one is you need to get an understanding of what great looks like in your current team. What are those pockets of brilliance? What are the reps that are consistently delivering?

And then what you need to do is you need to start analyzing the the data. You need to start painting a picture of what is the DNA of a high performer look like for your organization. And it this will be unique to your org based on your go-to, you know, based on your deal size, based on your go-to-market motion, based on the the sector that you're selling into, whether it's highly regulated or not. But within large organizations, this will even nuance by region.

So for some of our bigger customers, you know, the the high performer profile of a North American account executive looks very, very different to a high performing profile of an account executive in APAC. So you need you need you need to get an understanding of what great looks like and we can unpack that in a bit more detail, but you know, the the process that we advocate for at UHubs is you need to start off by understanding the quantitative picture of of high performance. So from a quantitative perspective, what does great look like? That means you need to look at historical metrics.

You need to start understanding what are those volume metrics that are driving high performance. So you start off with sales velocity, you want to understand, okay, win rates, like is it a high quality sell or is it more of a volume based sell? You need to understand sale cycle lengths. Are our high performers closing deals quicker than our low performers or are they actually taking their time with more strategic deals?

Do you want to start painting this this numerical picture of what high performers look like and you want to start to spot some of those trends. The next step is you want to go one step deeper. So you want to start looking at not only those sales velocity metrics that are driving the revenue number, you want to start looking at the leading indicators. And by leading indicators, I mean, what are some of those activity-based metrics?

Whether it's, you know, self-sourced pipeline generation that's happening. We often see that as a huge one for account executives as an example. So everyone likes to say that measuring activity is bullshit. And while generally speaking, I don't think with AEs you want to sit and measure activity all day.

I do think Matt, to what you said, the point when it comes to hiring, like if if your people aren't self-sourcing, you need to know that. If your people are, you need to know what good looks like. How do you set the expectations? So I I I love that you called out activity.

I think activity gets a bad rap because people do it wrong. What you can't do is say, okay, Mr. and Mrs. AE, you have to make a hundred calls a day and send 500 emails a day and, you know, that's what I'm going to look at.

You have to use activity working backwards from revenue to pipeline to activity to what's driven. So I love that you called that out. Yeah, totally, um, Adam. And I think, you know, you're absolutely right.

And obviously we're talking here, you know, with a bit more of a kind of an account executive lens. If you're thinking about your ideal profile for your SDRs, it tends to be a little bit more straightforward. And it tends to be, yeah, Absolutely. People buy from people.

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But but you're absolutely right. Like so so step one, you want to get that quantitative picture. Like quantitatively, what are the metrics that matter? What are the benchmarks that we need to be aiming for?

The next step is you want to go one layer layer deeper. So this is where, you know, and I spent years as a consultant doing this. So I was in EY's go-to-market transformation team. We would go out to private equity backed organizations that were trying to exit, and we would conduct these things called capability assessments.

And what that means is we would go out, we would survey reps. So we would use some psychometric tools. And this starts to look at things that you don't find in Salesforce. So this starts to look at sales people's beliefs.

What are their deep rooted beliefs that are often times formed from our childhood? What are personality types? How does that impact how we become a seller? You know, sales beliefs is a huge one because the way we believe humans operate can impact how we sell to people.

Yeah. And your beliefs can actually determine whether you're a better fit enterprise seller, or actually you're better off as a transactional SMB seller. So putting some of these softer, um, behavioral data points in place is really, really powerful. And then the third point alongside this is you need to have something called a competency or a capability matrix.

So you need to sit down as a leadership team, and you need to define what are the capabilities that we want to build and enable in our high performers in order for them to become successful. And once you've got a combination of those three things across your existing team, you get a really clear visualization of what great looks like and you can do that by team, by region, by geo. So that's the starting point. Start with your existing team, get a quantitative view, get a behavioral view and get a capability view.

What are the capabilities that are most important? And then that becomes the fabric. Once you understand that, that feeds back into your hiring profile, it feeds into your onboarding and ramp program, and it feeds back into your enablement program with with the rest as well. Where does where does culture fit into all of those, um, scoring and metrics that you just talked through?

It's a great question, Dale. Um, you know, we often I would say probably for about the large majority of our customers will have sales culture as one of the capabilities on their capability framework. So they'll actually be scoring their reps with a a combined culture score. And they'll be doing that, you know, through a 360 where the reps will be going through, they'll be sort of self-scoring, managers will be doing an observation as well.

Um, we actually did some research in Q1 of this year looking at the impact of sales culture on performance. Uh, and it's significant. It has like a really high correlation. I.

e. reps that score much higher in sales culture, um, it's a leading indicator of of performance. And I guess, I guess even ratcheting up one level further, not just sales culture, but culture from the company. Like, you know, do you fit into the culture across, for example, the go-to-market strat like marketing and CS, and how do you interact with the executives inside the company?

How do you, especially when you're going into the enterprise space? How do you interact with the product team, right? Because sales people are getting comments on product all the time. And if you don't know how to like, what I know when I was selling enterprise, a lot of times I, especially with bigger companies like Oracle, you would have to like sell as much internally as you did have to sell externally.

And so, like where does that fit into all of these data points that you're running? You know, I'll give an example of a customer we've got at the moment. They they've been sort of SMB mid-market, historically been a product-led organization. So, you know, that got them to a certain level of success.

They private equity have come in and acquired the business. They've brought in a new chief revenue officer. And we've just run that process that I described, right? So we've done a quantitative analysis, behavioral, and we've established a capability framework.

One of the things that's become really clear is that the capability profile of the current sales team that that leader has in place, it's not going to get them to enterprise where they're trying to go. And it's not going to get them there quick enough. It's going to be too much of a jump culturally, skills, knowledge, behaviors. The gap is just too big.

So, you know, I'm on a call with that CRO last week and and he's trying to make a strategic decision about, you know what, we're going to have to actually just do an aggressive restructure here. And we're going to have to hire for experienced enterprise sellers that can hit the ground running quicker because I don't have time to try and There's not enough time. You know, average tenure of a venture back CRO, I think down to 14 months now. It's not long.

Been there, done that. Um, so you know, we we see that a lot. It's funny, Dale. Yeah, it's funny you say that, Matt.

Um, it's funny because that's what happens a lot when we get brought in, right? So, um, what ends up happening is, well, well, we have we have like this framework called the go-to-market gap. And a lot of times people are bringing us in because we have to re-evaluate their sales team, like how do we actually bring in like, are they the right sales team? Do you have to go through a process?

Like, how do they fit into the overall structure? You know, because no one brings us in because, hey, everything's going great and like, you know, we just want to add some fuel to the fire. That'd be nice because we'd actually be able to drive into our our third and fourth part of our framework. But a lot of times we are like evaluating and trying to figure out what's happening with the team.

You know, is it a team thing or is it a ICP, buying persona, value proposition team? And sometimes you do need to be aggressive. Like the idea is not to let people go. The idea is to can you upskill them?

Do they have the right skill? identifying their competency, what's their lane of genius and then like working towards that lane of genius. But if you're if you're totally shifting from a SMB to an enterprise and you're kind of going, you know, a 360 degree turn, that can be very difficult for people inside the organization. 100%.

I mean, we we think about, um, yeah, one of my favorite books of all time is Jim Collins' Good to Great, right? And he says literally like, step one in all defining, sustaining companies is the first job of the leader is to get the right people on the bus sitting in the right positions. 100%. Right people, right seat, right time.

Matt, when you, when you look at like the future of sales hiring, like let's fast forward six months, 12 months. What what's what's going to change? What what what what what's going to change more broadly? Not just with what you're doing, but as, you know, AI comes more into play, as companies try to do more with less.

What what does sales hiring look like over the next 12 to 18, 24 months? It's a great question. You know, it's such an interesting time right now because everything I'm hearing from from leaders in the market is that things are changing so quickly, it's difficult to keep up. It feels like every week things are are being disrupted, right?

Um, we've been doing a lot of research. We obviously have a lot of data, and we've been looking into some of the trends and where things are headed. Some of the things that are interesting, and I I'll share a couple of tibits. So one, we are seeing a lot more demand from our customers for technical expertise and more technically minded sales people.

So we're already seeing that's a huge optic in terms of demand. We're seeing people putting it into their capability frameworks. We're seeing people hire for it in their ideal hiring profile. And when you and when you say technical, like can you just give a little bit more detail?

Is it like, I want to know that you can code Java or is it I want to know that you can think in the way of like articulating through chat GPT, Claud, code, etcetera? So for that we have a separate capability, which we call AI fluency that we benchmark teams against. That would refer more to your use of AI tools in your workflow. Um, when I used, when I described technical expertise, we're focused much more on your competence in selling technical solutions, ability to have a technical conversation with a customer.

So what's interesting is we we are seeing a little bit perhaps of the blurring of the lines between presales engineering and account executives, which is interesting because as solutions, as lots of organizations start bolting on AI into their product offering, there's an expectation that account executives need to be able to handle a lot more of these technical questions, whether it's integrations, um, you know, whether whether it's impacts on different tech stacks. Um, so so that's been an interesting insight. So to to once you're your original question, Adam, like, I think we're going to continue seeing that trend. Um, particularly for software, um, sellers.

Or maybe or maybe we just have this new position spinning up in regular, uh, organizations that is like a GTM engineer that goes with sales people. Like in traditional, I used to be a sales engineer. So that's kind of where I came up from. And so it's very interesting that it's coming back to that.

You're still a sales engineer, Dale. It comes back to that. And so, um, because if if you're technical enough and you do enough of the work, you can sit in a meeting and you can hang with the the CIOs of the world. And if you can do that, it becomes a bit of a superpower in the sales organization.

However, it takes a little bit of time. So keep going, sorry. It it's a very interesting full circle moment. Yeah, it's spot on.

And I think, you know, that was kind of linked to another trend that we're seeing, Dale, is we are seeing a shift towards more a higher tenure. So our data set is suggesting that new hires that have been made, the average tenure of those hires in terms of career tenure, is going up. So in general, the market is demanding more experienced sales hires, which means that less hiring as a whole, again, we're only focused again, you know, on VC private equity backed software companies. It's one segment of the market.

I can't speak for the the the more macro trend, but our data is suggesting that there's less graduate level hiring happening within sales teams. I think whether that continues to be a longer-term trend, remains unknown. I think there is a lot of questions to answer that around like, what about talent pipeline? Like, how do we continue feeding go-to-market teams if we're no longer hiring these SDR straight out of school?

Um, but that is a trend that we're seeing at the moment. We'll we'll report back on whether that continues. Um, So I mean those are sort of a couple of things. I think, you know, we we are seeing uh a shift in that senior profile towards more of a consultative enterprise profile more generally.

So that's what the market is demanding and rewarding right now. I think that makes sense because AI is disrupting first the kind of SMB transactional end of the market, you know. One of my customers said to me last week that they've currently got a BDR team of like 65 BDRs and she was like, yeah, it's a ticking time bomb. She says 65 BDRs, that's a ridiculous amount of BDRs.

So, you know, they're kind of days are numbered. And she already knows that those team members are going to promote into other parts of the organization and continue their careers, but they're not hiring at the same rate that they were because they're just they're focusing on automation. So I think we're going to continue seeing that trend. I think, you know, it it overall there's obviously a lot of talk in the market at the moment around is sales, you know, are all of our jobs at risk?

Um, I don't think so. No, I think it's easier than ever to stand out now, to be honest. Yeah, I'd agree with that. I'd agree with that.

And and our data suggests so that the hiring is being focused on those with the capabilities, the experience, um, yeah. As opposed to just that volume based hiring. And you you have to you have to personalize, right? Like regardless of what the role is, like you have to stand out and and be human.

And I think that's one of the good things that's come out from everything we're seeing in AI is like if you really want to win, whether it's email, whether it's events, you know, events are a whole different story, but you have to stand out and be a human. The days of like, hey Matt, I I hope this email finds you well, um, are are gone. And no one wants to hire people to do that anymore. And to the point of hiring properly, when you are hiring and you have someone that that's been what they've done for the better part of, you know, God knows how long, where it's, you know, they logged into their sales engagement platform, they were handed 2,000 leads and they were told to push a button, um, you know, and, you know, if someone responds, and like Dale, you're smiling, but you know it's true.

Like if someone responds, they then hit another button that's a template, you know, sequenced response, um, you know, you're not going to be successful anymore doing that. You have to, uh, you have to show your chops. Oh, you have to think. So, cool.

I I I I think it's exciting what you all are doing. I think that de-risking hiring is incredibly important. Um, you know, you talked about the CRO tenure being 14 months, VP of sales is even less than that, AEs, BDRs, you know, all of these go-to-market roles are turning at clips that we've never seen before. Um, and there's not enough talk.

Like everyone talks about, you know, oh, the cost of a bad hire and, you know, you're going to be, you know, you hire someone and then you're three months to hire someone else, and that's great. But what people don't talk about enough, and I'm glad you started with this, is the amount of money, the amount of runway, the amount of burn that this is costing your organization that isn't in your spreadsheet and your modeling, because you're not smart enough to figure it out, and and I mean no disrespect when I say that, but no one's thinking about it, right? So you're not thinking that shit, I just cost myself, you know, a quarter of a million dollars. Well, where?

Because you're not hiring properly. Um, so I love what you all are doing when it comes to de-risking hiring. I wish people would take this approach more often. I appreciate that.

Yeah, look, it's it's as I said, it's it's pretty bonkers that we've continued the way we have for so so many years. Um, you know, I I've got sort of stories from my my EY days where we'd go into like even bigger organizations where the the cost of the unsuccessful hires was even greater. Uh, and that model was just like continued, um, somehow even up until now. Crazy.

So I I think we're at a reset moment. Um, we have definitely seen that across our customer base. That, you know, private equity boards in particular are demanding efficiency, right? They're not willing to invest dollars in revolving door recruitment policies.

They're they're placing pressure on leadership teams to show ROI on their commercial investment. Awesome. Well, we're coming to the end here. Let's do some rapid fire.

10 words or less. See if we can, uh, run through some of these things super quickly. First one up. Hardest sales higher mistake you've personally made.

First sales hire for us, previous startup of mine. I don't care what anyone says, when when you're like borderline product market fit, pre-product market fit, I mean when you think you have product market fit and then you're trying to hire that first sales hire and transition from founder lead sales, that's brutal. Yeah, we we we we deal with that every single day. What is uh, what's one GTM metric that's overrated in hiring?

Past performance. Mm. I like that one. Um, I'm going this is going to be a two-parter.

What's one sales skill more leaders should be testing for, so testing their people for, and what's one skill the leader should be tested on? What's one skill that the leader should be tested on? Yeah, and then what should they be testing people for when they when they hire them? It's really difficult to answer this in less than 10 words.

I've already used up my 10 words. Um, part one. Um, you can break Dale's rules. If I if I gave the rules, you can't break them, but since Dale gave them, you can break the rules today.

Um, look, we obviously have tons of data on on this stuff, so it's quite difficult to, um, generalize it into like one thing. But if I was to, you know, think about like a word or a trend or a data point that we see is the highest predictor of success, it's actually more on the softer side. So it tends to be more about like resilience, um, and perseverance. And and we we think about things, you know, there's techniques you can do where you can dig into past behaviors and childhood and start to understand like how they've overcome difficulties in their past life.

I think those things fundamentally as like a core capability that can ride you through, um, most roles is is like the one thing that's that's and that's stuff's harder to coach, right? It's more of like a willingness and a character trait. So so resilience, I would say is one. Um, in terms of what the hiring managers should be tested for.

Um, this is a really interesting one because we're doing a lot at the moment around coaching effectiveness. And we're actually seeing that there's a frontline manager crisis where frontline managers just aren't doing coaching. They think they are, but they're not. Um, Yeah.

Very true. Very true. That that could be a whole another show. Um, there's a whole lack of lack of coaching, um, going on.

Uh, broadly speaking, from frontline managers to even second and third line managers. I think that this mindset of coaching is kind of gone out the window. Um, and it's you can tell when you're just looking at the quality of talent and talent development. 100%.

Maybe we get you guys on our podcast to talk about that as a follow-up episode. I'd like it. I love it. Let's do it.

Matt, thank you so much for joining, man. This was awesome. De-risking hiring. Uh, thanks for sharing all sorts of great info, man.

Appreciate it, guys. Yeah, great uh, great conversation, enjoyed it a lot and uh, yeah, Dale we'll have to get Adam on the pick ball court sometime. Let's go.