Hiring salespeople shouldn’t feel like a gamble, yet many companies treat it exactly that way. Walter Crosby, CEO of Helix Sales Development, recently shared his unconventional wisdom on the Sales POP! with host John Golden—and his insights challenge everything we think we know about recruiting top sales talent.
Stop Selling in Your Job Ads
Here’s a radical idea: your job posting should scare away the wrong candidates. Crosby draws an unexpected parallel to Navy SEALs recruitment—they don’t sugarcoat the difficulty, and neither should you. Instead of listing perks and painting rosy pictures, be brutally honest about what the role demands.
The best candidates? They’ll lean in. Everyone else will self-select out, saving you countless hours of interviewing people who were never going to succeed anyway.
The Industry Experience Trap
Stop obsessing over whether candidates have sold your exact product before. Crosby argues that product knowledge is the easy part—you can teach that in weeks. What you can’t easily teach is the ability to understand buyers, speak their language, and build genuine trust.
A salesperson who deeply understands your buyer’s world but has never touched your product will outperform someone with a Rolodex full of contacts but no real buyer insight. Every time.
Interview Like You’re Qualifying a Prospect
Most hiring managers flip the script too early. They meet a halfway-decent candidate and immediately start selling the company. Bad move.
Treat your interview process like a discovery call. Ask tough questions. Dig into how they’ve handled rejection, what they’ve learned from lost deals, and how they’ve invested in developing their craft. The candidates worth hiring will engage with curiosity and energy, not defensiveness.
But remember—challenging doesn’t mean hostile. The best sales talent expects to be tested, but they also expect respect. Balance is everything.
Cultural Fit Isn’t About Ping-Pong Tables
Assess cultural alignment early, before you get attached to a candidate’s impressive quota attainment. But here’s the thing: culture isn’t about superficial perks or whether someone wants to grab beers after work.
Dig into deeper values. How do they think about customer relationships? What kind of autonomy do they need to thrive? What does integrity mean to them in a sales context?
These conversations reveal whether someone will strengthen your team’s cohesion or slowly poison it—no matter how many deals they close.
The Coachability Factor
Crosby emphasizes one non-negotiable trait: coachability. You can have all the natural talent in the world, but if you can’t take feedback and adapt, you’ll plateau fast.
Look for candidates who ask thoughtful questions during interviews. Probe how they’ve sought help when struggling with deals. The ones who demonstrate genuine curiosity and openness to learning? Those are your future stars.
Strategic, Not Desperate
The biggest mistake? Hiring out of fear. An empty territory feels painful, but a bad hire is exponentially worse—financially and culturally.
Develop a repeatable process. Front-load your discovery. And resist the urge to fill seats just because they’re empty. Patience in hiring creates momentum in performance.
Crosby’s approach isn’t complicated, but it requires discipline. Stop hiring reactively. Start hiring strategically. Your future sales numbers will thank you.
Our Host
John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.
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