Importance of Cultural Fit When Hiring Salespeople

What is Cultural Fit in Sales Hiring?

Cultural fit in sales hiring means evaluating a candidate against the company’s values and team fit. This can be a bit tricky as it’s not super tangible or easy to articulate why someone does or doesn’t align. But the importance of cultural fit when hiring salespeople? It’s huge.

Aligned values and team fit help companies and sales teams work together for effective communication, increased productivity, and stronger team morale. This results in a healthy team dynamic and, according to Gartner, helps organisations retain sales talent and bolster sales performance by up to 24%.

Importance of Cultural Fit When Hiring Salespeople

Enhances Collaboration and Engagement

The importance of cultural fit when hiring salespeople is that it helps you build a sales team that functions under the same values, amplifying effective collaboration.

This means effective deal teaming, sharing of knowledge and market intel, and a better sense of ‘we win together, we lose together’.

These points are important in sales, especially when welcoming new talent. A united sales team practices strong internal collaboration to make sure every member has what it takes to succeed as a sales rep in that environment.

Boosts Motivation

A study by SHRM revealed that corporate culture (45%) is one of the most important factors for job satisfaction. Another study by Robert Walter pointed out that 74% of talent gets demotivated when working in a company with poor cultural fit.

In a role like sales, motivation is absolutely critical, meaning you can’t ignore the importance of cultural fit when hiring salespeople. Pushing past no’s, daily rejection and frustration when deals fall over is critical to being successful in the role. Adding poor culture fit to these challenges is a fast pathway to failure.

Minimises Turnover Cost

Mishires affect multiple company resources like finances, training time and effort, and team adjustments. But a BetterUp study found that turnover rates are 50% lower when the employees’ values match the company’s. This is significant in a segment like sales that has high turnover rates of over 30%.

Practicing the Importance of Cultural Fit When Hiring Salespeople

Define Company Culture

First, employers must define the company’s culture before hiring salespeople. And that culture depends on the company’s industry. There is no one-size-fits-all. Answer questions like: What are the company’s core values? Which leadership style works best? What is the communication style?

Employers can gather this information through culture decks, employee surveys, and leadership workshops. The information helps build cultural clarity and define the soft skills for a sales job description at the same time. The data should be well-documented to help hiring managers, interview panels, and even sales recruiters stay consistent with the cultural identity.

It’s also a great step to give space for cultural growth. Eg, practicing “culture add” when hiring salespeople. “Culture add” is the recruitment practice of hiring candidates who can contribute new experiences, or perspectives in the company.

Include Company Culture in Job Description

Once the culture is on paper, hiring managers can use it to attract sales candidates. Incorporating the company culture as early as the job description helps narrow the talent pool, too. It acts as a filter to attract those who align with or are excited by the culture, and crosses out those who don’t.

Use Behavioral Interview Questions

One of the best ways to see whether a candidate is a good match is through interviews.  Skills listed in a resume can give a limited background on their character and how it ties to the company culture. Instead, use behavioral questions through sales scenarios. These can tap into their past experiences and gauge their situational decisions.

Here are some examples:

• Describe a time when you had to collaborate with a difficult team member. How did you handle it?
• Tell me about a situation where you had to adapt your sales approach to meet a client’s unique needs.
• How do you prioritise ethical considerations when closing a deal?

Questions like this can reveal whether a candidate operates with similar values (or is highly adaptable to them) as the company.

Practice Leadership Participation

On the other hand, sales managers and leaders must also embody the company culture and values, as culture flows down from them. Every sales member will look up to their team leaders as role models and it’s much easier for them to practice the company culture when the leaders are living examples.

Another reason is that team leaders/managers have a direct hand when building sales teams. They direct the characteristics every sales candidate should have in order to excel in the company and role.

Communicating Cultural Fit With Recruitment Partners

Sales recruitment agencies can be great partners in building sales teams, especially when companies choose a recruitment agency that specialises in their industry. But a key part of making this successful is communicating the culture fit and ensuring they really get it. This would include sitting down for a meeting over coffee to discuss company values, the mission and vision, and the USP.

That is also the time to discuss what your dream sales team looks like. The characteristics they should possess to fit in with the company culture, as well as past experiences that would help the company achieve sales goals and build solutions to improve processes.

Having a solid grip on the importance of cultural fit when hiring salespeople and what it stands for in the company is a must. This helps sales recruiters find and filter talent who best align with the company’s values.

For companies, recruitment partners are also great sources of information on the sales talent market. Don’t hesitate to ask questions.

Hiring Your Next Sales Team with Salient

Salient is APAC’s leading tech and sales recruitment agency. We’ve worked with start-ups all the way to developed companies. We focus on the middle-funnel tech talent to help companies scale and maintain a competitive advantage in their SaaS field.

Ready to hire your next sales team? Drop us a line – we’d love to connect with you.