PreSales Hireside Chats

Is personality diversity on a PreSales team important?
If it is important, how do we go about ensuring it is factored into the hiring process?
We enjoyed a very insightful conversation with Adolfo Lozano Torralvo, discussing this and other topics related to his PreSales hiring philosophy. Thanks Adolfo!

Hiring from industry can lead to a PreSales team's best hires. They understand an industry’s drivers intimately and can operate at a peer level with customers, leading to more trust, customer centricity and better solutioning. They also bring any PreSales team a new perspective, having been in the customers' shoes.
That said, it’s hard to identify those who can successfully make the shift into a PreSales role and for them to 'see it'; after all, it requires an open mind and a big leap of faith for any individual - successful and well-considered where they are - to make what feels like a significant and unplanned career shift.
David Schultz runs a global PreSales team and has been able to hire a whopping 50% of SC’s from industry. How have they done it?! During a fantastic conversation, we asked him about this, as well as discussing hiring through fast growth, whilst building a culture to be proud of. Big thanks Dave!

What do accountants, recruiters, country singers, painters, proposal writers, psychology professors and TV news anchors (!) have in common?
Amin Ibrahim and his team have hired them all as Solution Consultants!
We’ve now surveyed 65 PreSales hiring managers and the data is clear, the following is a breakdown of factors considered when hiring and the % of hiring managers that rate these at 8/10 important or more:
Drive and motivation: 97%
Soft skills: 88%
Cultural fit: 86%
Hard skills….. a meager 17% (even less if you strip away highly technical PreSales roles)
Demand for PreSales professionals has always (considerably) outstripped supply of ready-made professionals. If underlying soft skills, motivation and cultural fit are what make the difference when hiring, it would follow that designing a hiring process capable of reliably and accurately assessing the softer side of a candidate’s profile can be a real unlock in getting roles filled faster with ‘made-for-PreSales-gems’ from outside the industry included in the interview pool.
In our conversations we’ve heard many references to recent graduates of the PreSales Academy coming from teaching, A-player hires from customers / industry, musicians, actors and other performers.. very encouraging to see. The trick is to take the time to think through what underlying attributes make for a high-performing, intrinsically motivated presales professional and how to confidently assess them.

The interview process is akin to a sales campaign, including a discovery component.
For candidates: Using your discovery skills, to accurately understand the position you’re interviewing for will showcase these PreSales skills, help you at the demo stage and allow you to qualify and understand better the role you are looking for.
For hiring managers: Use this as an evaluation point, how well do candidates’ questions uncover the heart of the position? How well do their questions allow them to excel at the demo stage?

In the midst of layoffs and a tighter hiring market there is currently a unique opportunity for PreSales leaders to develop their network of potential future hires. Especially with individuals who may previously not have been open to a conversation.
Matt Walker has extensive experience hiring for fast growth, from our conversation with him it’s clear he has thought deeply about team building, including this take on how to continually build a network for future hiring.

When it comes to hiring, what do four-year-olds constantly remind us?
Anyone who has spent time with a 4-year-old will know how good kids are at asking ‘why?’… and for each answer… ‘and why?’! again and again and again, it’s beautiful how hardwired they are to learn. What’s more, each why is asked without preconceived ideas or judgments (AKA biases!)
We spoke with Adam Cook, PreSales leader at Tableau, Adam offered sound advice for hiring managers: keep drilling down into a new level of detail. With interviewing depth trumps breadth (and you can always divide question areas between interviewers for more breadth, this happens less than you’d expect).

We’ve now surveyed almost 50 PreSales leaders on hiring, one preliminary result is that 89% of hiring managers rate cultural fit as 8/10 important or above when hiring, that's a high percentage! – It’s rated even more essential than soft skills and a lot more than hard skills where only 21% of managers give an 8/10 importance or above.
We’ve also noticed – anecdotally,  from the conversations we’ve had - that managers who talk a lot about cultural fit also seem to have enjoyed strong team retention over the recent years of peak ‘war for talent’. Cultural fit for these managers seems to mean commonality in core values (rather than personality type or background) and also combines with a conscious desire from the manager for harmony and good vibes on the team.
Max Borgmann has a high-performing SC team which has seen very little turnover in recent years, in our conversation he said 75% of what he looks for is cultural fit.

Adaptability is the characteristic Bruce Walcroft values most when interviewing for his PreSales team. Here he expands on why adaptability is so important to him and what else he rates.

67% of the 50+ PreSales managers we’ve surveyed report their reliance on intuition at 8/10 or above.. with the 1-to-1 interview with the hiring manager the highest-rated component of the process.
 
At the same time, 47% believe that unconscious bias exists across the interviewing team at a 4/5 rating or above..
 
So, how can we balance harnessing intuition from all interviewers in a hiring team and reduce the impact of bias? Should a hiring manager give more weight to differing members of the hiring panel? We asked Woodrow Evans, after 100+ SE hires he provided some fantastic nuggets of wisdom around this and other aspects of hiring.

We asked Rebecca Applewhite, Solutions Consulting Director at Remote, what she has seen lead to high performance in PreSales. We also discussed how she evaluates these characteristics in the interview process. Below is a snippet from the conversation.
Rebecca is a joy to speak with and incredibly sharp, if you’re an SC in the Global Mobility or broader HR space I’d highly recommend having Remote on your radar, I’m sure her team would be a very rewarding and fun place to work.