Sales Candidate Profile: A Step-by-Step Crafting Guide

What is a Sales Candidate Profile?

A sales candidate profile is a blueprint of a top candidate for a specific position. In this case, it’s for a sales representative. It highlights ideal qualifications, like years of sales experience, work ethic, as well as hard and soft skills. It serves as the hiring manager’s compass in identifying the right candidate for a specific sales role.

Have you heard of the term ‘purple squirrel’? It refers to a candidate who shows exceptional traits, skills, and characteristics that match a specific job position. In a competitive market like sales, hiring managers will want a sales purple squirrel. And it is possible to attract and find them with a well-thought-out sales candidate profile.

Your Sales Candidate Profile

Here is a simple step-by-step guide to help you define your sales candidate profile.

Step 1: Set Your Goal/s

First, what is your goal with this specific sales role? Define sales quota, sales motion proficiency, industry expertise, sales methodology and new business sales versus existing business sales. What is it that you want to achieve with this new sales hire?

Write down your goal/s. It will serve as your guide in listing the qualities of your ideal sales candidate.

Step 2: Conduct Role Analysis

Next, assess your current sales team and meet with stakeholders to build your hiring criteria. What is missing in the current sales team? Also, who is performing well or performing parts of the role well? You’ll want to list these skills to build what is missing and skills to continue improving your team’s performance.

These will help design the sales role specifics.

Step 3: Define Job Requirements

Meeting with the stakeholders has solidified the required sales skills. Put together your analysis and goals to define the job requirements. You’ll be listing the criteria for your sales rep characteristics, such as:

• 5 years track record of closing SaaS deals of $50K + (we want to level up the team in more complex sales skills)
• Experience selling into marketing and digital stakeholders (our top reps have deep stakeholder empathy)
• Strengths in prospecting and lead generation (currently limited marketing support)
• Had experience demonstrating their own product (we’ve had 2 new hire failures who have struggled with this)
• Bachelor’s degree
• CRM competency with HubSpot or Salesforce

The sales rep characteristics depend on the role you are building. Organize them into one document, and it is the start of the job description. These serve as the hard skills.

Step 4: List Complementing Soft Skills

After putting together the hard skills, you can add the soft skills that would elevate the job requirements. These are personal and interpersonal qualities you want your ideal sales rep to have. Skills that will build your company’s culture for the better.

Why? This is an opportunity to continue growing a healthy working environment. Also, a research study found that 85% of job success is rooted in soft skills.

Some examples are:

• Comfortable with ambiguity
• Resilient
• Team player
• Strong passion for marketing technology
• Active listening

These qualities will help you evaluate if the sales candidate fits the company’s culture and can be mentored to align with the company’s values.

Step 5: Sales Recruitment Implementation

Once you’ve finalized the skills, requirements, and characteristics you want for your next sales representative, your sales candidate profile is ready for use. One strategy you can use is creating an assessment form with these listed qualities and having a simple scoring system for interviews. It will help you filter the sales candidates that match your sales candidate profile and those that don’t.

Finding Top Sales Candidates with Salient

A sales candidate profile not only helps the company’s internal hiring team – it is also an effective tool to help recruitment agencies find the top sales candidates for the company.

Salient is a leading tech and sales recruitment agency for Tech-Centered companies. We were founded in 2007, and APAC’s first SaaS recruitment agency. We focus on connecting talents to tech companies. Talent community is the heart of what we do.

Looking for a sales recruitment agency to help build your tech sales team? Partner with us.