Mediaboss Marketing

Last year, my partner and I raised $3 million to scaleJumpCrew, our social marketing and sales outsourcing business. Our first task: sharingour ideal hiring profile with the new recruitment team.

Related:Why, and How, to Hire for Potential Over Experience

JumpCrew wasn't our first venture. Over the past seven years, we have hired hundreds of salespeople for JumpCrew, LocalVox and other clients. And during this period, the composition of our teams and our ideal profile of a top performer have bothmaterially changed.

What started as a surprising observation about top performers turned into a fascinating discovery, one which performance data ultimately supported and one whichre-shaped our hiring strategy.Last October, that discovery helped us set our 12-month hiring goals and defineour ideal team and individual profiles.

Subsequently, the majority of our first 100 hires had . . . little or no experience in either marketing or sales. --How's that, again?

Like most companies, we had started with the assumption that our top performers would be experienced salespeople who transitioned to digital marketing with sales savvy. Butwe were wrong.

In our fast-growth SaaS environment, we learned that recent grads often outperformed sales pros with 10 to 15 years experience.In hindsight, we were experiencing a transformative moment in the SaaS economys influence on productivity. The impact of new sales and marketing technologies had fundamentally altered what creates "success."

In fact, time and again, our top performers were:

In short, we found that more experienced employees brought more biasregarding how they thought they could be most effective. Less experienced employees, in contrast,brought less bias and enrolled in our processes more fully.Above all, our most successful salespeople were those who were team players and collaborated effectively.

We were also able to identify, as our outperformers, reps who took the Challenger approach. The Challenger approach describes employees with the insight and confidence to challenge assumptions they know are not true. This seems obvious, but in reality a lot of salespeople don't work that way.

The correlation between those taking the Challenger approach and those who are outperformers was not surprising.A 2007 Harvard Business Review studyshowed that fully 54 percentof the top performers looked at werechallengers (as opposed to "relationship builders," "hard workers," "lone wolves" and "reactive problem-solvers.")

The surprise for us was that even among those we considered challengers, the majority of top-tier performers had little or no experience.Instead, they shared these traits:

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Building to Scale, 'No Experience Required' - Entrepreneur