Ultimate Guide to B2B Sales Hiring and Management

B2B sales involves one business selling its product to another business. Those with experience in both B2B and B2C sales know that B2B is a lot tougher—the deals are bigger, there’s often more than one decision-maker, and the competition is intense. For all those reasons, hiring and management must be on point.

And that’s exactly why we’ve put together this list of the best resources around SaaS and B2B sales. We update it on a regular basis, so if you have a favorite link you don’t see here, please reach out.

Conducting interviews

What Interviewing 600+ Sales Reps Taught Me About Team Building
Loom’s Peter Prowitt shares the biggest mistakes to avoid if you’re interviewing for a sales position.
14 SaaS Leaders Share Their Favorite Interview Questions
What’s your biggest weakness? For many folks in leadership positions, the answer might be… asking job candidates good questions.
Sales Hiring Assessment: How You Should Actually Be Interviewing Top Sales Reps
For sales leaders at B2B SaaS companies, recruiting top talent isn’t just an ongoing challenge, it’s one of the most important parts of their role. Continuously hiring, managing, and retaining the right team can be incredibly difficult and time consuming—if you don’t have the right tools and processes in place to make it scalable, that is.
20 of the Best Interview Questions for Sales Hires
We asked 20 top B2B sales leaders and experts for their favorite interview question to ask new sales hires. Find out what they said.
3 Ways to Get a Better Read on Your Sales Candidate
The last thing you can afford is a bad sales hire. Here are three creative ways to switch up your interview process and get a more accurate understanding of sales candidates.

Hiring

How to Hire Enterprise Salespeople
Building an effective (and committed) enterprise sales team for the long haul starts with the people you hire. This is a great time to reflect and strategize so you can hire the very best people when the time is right.
Founders Shouldn’t Hire a VP of Sales—Here’s Why
Unless you’re extremely well-versed in executive sales recruiting, trying to hire a VP of Sales on your own is a recipe for disaster.
How to Build a Success Profile for New Sales Hires
Finding the perfect sales hire is a lot of work. Learn how John Kaplan of Force Management recommends streamlining the process by building success profiles.
Be Wary of Hiring Reps on the “Sales Rebound”
How can you tell when a sales candidate is truly into you and your company, and not just looking to make a change? Sales management strategist Lee Salz shares three interview questions to get to the heart of their motivation.
B2B Sales Hiring Tips and Trends from the Trenches
Learn how companies are successfully scaling their sales teams with the latest B2B sales hiring tips, tactics, and approaches proven to work.
Corporate Cupid: Be Sure Your New VP of Sales is the Perfect Match
Executive matchmaking is no small task. With so much riding on a role like VP of Sales you need to be confident your top candidate is in fact “the one.” Sales management strategist and talent management expert Lee Salz identifies what to look for to ensure it’s a match made in heaven—not hell.
6 Uncoachable Qualities of Remarkable Sales Managers
There are many skills a sales rep can learn through experience, but there are also several that simply can’t be taught. Pantheon VP Sales and Business Development Scott Crawford outlines six uncoachable qualities to look for in your next great sales manager.
The Secret to Better Sales Hires as You Scale
No one has time or resources to waste on bad hires—especially in sales. How do you sniff out the best candidates? Force Management Managing Partner John Kaplan shares a simple secret for ensuring success.

Compensation

Show Me the Money! A Guide to Creating a Scalable Sales Compensation Plan
We’ve all heard Tom Cruise’s famous line from Jerry Maguire, but showing your sales team members the money is often a complicated equation. In this guide, you’ll find tips for designing sales compensation packages that yield results and actually scale.

Onboarding

5 Common Gaps in Sales Onboarding: Trish Bertuzzi on a Better Way to Ramp Up New Hires
You might be investing time, money, and resources into recruiting top sales talent, but if you don’t have an effective sales onboarding program in place you’re throwing away your investment.
Common Mistakes Made When Onboarding Salespeople
In this podcast interview, leading sales management strategist and talent management expert Lee B. Salz discusses some of the common mistakes managers make when onboarding sales people.

Tips for first-time sales managers

Rookie Move: 3 Big Mistakes First-Time Sales Managers Make
Avoid these rookie sales manager mistakes before you strike out and turn into a micromanaging monster.
First-Time Sales Managers: 4 Tips to Help You Crush Your Numbers
As a first-time sales manager, you may be used to hitting your own goals, but now you’re responsible for your entire team’s performance. Pantheon VP Sales and Business Development Scott Crawford provides four tips to help you rise to the challenge.

Leading a remote sales team

6 Ways to Revive Your Sales Culture While You’re (Still) Remote
Ambition co-founder Brian Trautschold shares the ideas he’s used with his own sales team.
How to Lead a Remote Sales Team
A new, scaling startup sales team requires hyper-attention under the best of circumstances. Add in the challenge of going remote overnight—as so many of us did earlier this year—and leading a team might feel like treading water.

How to motivate your team and evaluate sales rep performance

Stepping into the Sales Trap: Colleen Francis on the Sales Mistakes that Cause Serious Pipeline Havoc
Sales expert and entrepreneur Colleen Francis hates to be a Debbie Downer, but she has a warning for expansion-stage companies whose sales organizations killed it last quarter: Next quarter might suck. In fact, if you’re not careful, it could be a total failure.
Top 10 Ways to Motivate Sales Reps Without Money
Sure, money talks, but if you really want to inspire your reps to break through walls you need to tap into something deeper. Sales executive, educator, and entrepreneur Jeff Hoffman provides 10 creative ways to encourage and reward above-and-beyond performance.
3 Tips for Helping Reps Avoid Sales Burnout
The year’s first quarter has come and gone. Is your sales team’s excitement about the New Year still burning brightly, or is it already showing signs of fizzling out?
Converting Dysfunctional Sales Teams to High-Impact Sellers
Dysfunction: the word comes up in conversation every day, usually in relation to crazy families, nutty reality show contestants, and all-around gossip. But what happens when the word dysfunction can be applied to your sales team?
When and Why to Promote Your Sales Reps
Is your star sales development representative’s next job with you or a competitor? Kevin Gaither, Vice President of Inside Sales at uSamp, explains why it’s crucial to develop a sales career path for your outbound sales team.
Why Promoting Top Salespeople to Sales Managers Can Be a Big Mistake
Do you really want to stick your top sales rep in a management position? Sales expert Lee Salz explains why promoting top salespeople to sales managers can actually hurt your business.

Metrics and benchmarks

Sales Metrics for BDRs and Account Executives
When evaluating BDRs and Account Executives it often comes down to the numbers. But which numbers should those be, exactly?
9 Sales Benchmarks for Building a Scalable Sales Machine

By allowing companies to better evaluate and understand their own metrics, sales benchmarks can give executives and managers a much better sense of what to expect when launching a customer acquisition initiative into a new market or when building a new sales team.
Dial Down Your Dials: Key Sales Prospecting Metrics to Help Your Reps Boost Their Call Quality (Not Quantity)
Increasing sales is simple—ask your team to make more sales calls and they’ll come back with more deals, right? Or maybe not. Former InsightSquared VP Zorian Rotenberg debunks the flawed strategy of focusing solely on quantity, and offers key sales prospecting metrics for determining the true effectiveness of your team.

Forecasting

Advanced Sales Forecasting Methods: Getting More from Your Sales Forecasts and Improving the Quality of Your Pipeline
Sales forecasting is primarily a management reporting exercise for the CEO/Board, but if you’re not leveraging this process to make real, impactful improvements to your business you’re missing a huge opportunity.
5 Tips Every VP of Sales Needs to Run a Successful Forecast Meeting
Ori Yankelev reveals why the most important step in the sales forecasting process is instituting a regular forecast meeting.