Systematizing Go-To-Market Hiring

This chart holds the secret to successful hiring of go-to-market teams.

What is it? A stack rank of attributes within HubSpot account executive candidates that correlate to quota attainment. Preparation, adaptability, domain experience, & intelligence topped the list. Closing ability correlated negatively. The pushier the account executive, the worse the result. That result alone should encourage rethinking of AE interviewing.

Mark Roberge ran this regression in Excel about 10 years ago. It formed the basis for a career at HubSpot predicated on consistent quantitative analysis to scale the go-to-market, which he detailed in the Sales Acceleration Formula in 2015. I think it’s still one of the best books on how to repeatably scale sales teams.

Mark isn’t the sole person to identify better ways of identifying great talent for GTM teams. Adam Grant delimited the types of interviews with the greatest predictive power.

The biggest challenge in interviews: interviewers try to hire themselves. That bias is especially present in unstructured interviews where social skills & in particular the ability to establish rapport influences the outcome.

Structured interviews, meaning interviews that screen for preparation, adaptability, & domain experience at Hubspot, triple the predictive power of an interview from 8% to 24%. Situational judgement questions add another trenchant arrow to a hiring manager’s quiver.

What would the chart above look like for your sales team? Does your interview process screen for those attributes?

The cost of an incorrect hire is 6-12 months. In a time when predictability & profitability matters more than ever, systematized GTM recruiting processes provide a competitive advantage.