Skills vs Industry Experience - what to prioritise when hiring B2B sales people on a budget

A friend of mine runs a SaaS startup. We had worked together a bit during his early stage development using the problem-impact-cause approach to identify his potential customers' most impactful problems and define the early stage features of his product.

So when he went out to hire his first B2B sales person to expand his customer base beyond his initial customer contacts, his top requirements were:

• Extensive industry experience, and

• Deep embrace of the gap selling approach.

What he found was that in his field, people who met both criteria were way out of his financial range.

He found candidates he could afford to hire, who had:

• either extensive industry experience but didn't really take to gap selling

• or candidates who had strong gap selling / consultative selling approaches but no industry experience.

So he asked me - what is more important? Whom should I hire?

Why industry experience matters

The reason gap selling experts (or even consultative selling experts for that matter) are so hung up on experience, is that you want to be a trusted advisor for your customer. Someone they trust to:

• Understands their problems (even better than they do)

• Helps them solve their problems.

So the more experience you have in your customer's industry the more valuable insights you can provide. You have just seen more similar situations, you know in general how the processes in companies like your customer's work .... You are an expert in their industry.

Why gap selling skills matters more

But as much as Keenan in his book "Gap Selling" and others emphasise the importance of having deep industry understanding, they also provide the limitation of that. "Every customer's problem is different". Their superficial operational needs might be the same, but the even more crucial parts, their "why" and the impact the problem has on their business are always different.

To discover those you need a strong discovery. The willingness to learn as much as you can about your customer. And of course the more you already know about their industry the better, even though it might create the danger to jump to conclusions. Nothing loses you a sales faster than a customer feeling misunderstood or generalised.

Keenan states in his book "I don't really care what product or service you offer because selling to [me] is selling - you can apply the methodology or principles to anything".

And quite often your company's products or services are not only used in one industry. I recently worked with a client who wanted to sell his product into retail as well as hospitality industry. Two entirely different customer segments, with entirely different problems, different processes and different business impacts - for the same product.

Gap selling forces sales people to learn

When your sales people start gap selling, they don't just pick up the phone and start calling. Gap selling requires a lengthy and detailed preparation for which they rely on the expertise you have in your team.

When I do a gap selling project with a client I usually plan two-to-four weeks of (part-time) preparation, because it as period of extensive exchange with the client's experts to prepare my problem-impact-cause sheet, to identify our different solutions for the different problems and prepare the messaging to use during prospecting. By that time I usually have a good starting understanding of my client's customers' industry and so will any good gap seller you hire.

Pair with an expert

Some of the best sales people I know always work together with a "master expert", whom they involve at some stage in the selling process. No gap sale is done in a single customer engagement. Sales develop over several micro sales, often involving engagements with different stakeholders. So you have amble occasion to bring in additional experience when needed.

When working with a sales person without experience in your industry it makes a lot of sense to pair her or him with the best industry expert in your team and let them work together in a phased approach:

1. They prepare together the materials needed before starting to gap sell.

2. The expert listens in on the first number of calls and writes down everything that comes to mind from his experience (like an experience brain storming driven by customer conversation) and goes over it afterwards with the sales person.

3. Once the sales person has settled down with industry knowledge, the expert serves as a sounding board, helps with solution development and potentially accompanies the sales person to meetings with topic experts on the customer side.

Hire for attitude

Simon Sinek says "You don't hire for skills, you hire for attitude. You can always teach skills." So maybe I should not have called it gap selling skills. But rather the competences and attitude necessary to conduct good gap selling. And this is what you should hire for:

• Dedication to listening and learning (as much as possible about your clients)

• Ability to think on their feed (to process and use new customer information)

• "Problem solver" attitude

• "Always stand up again" attitude (to survive the always occurring bad fits with customer gaps)

• Being relatable (to pass that very first hurdle on a call)

Pair a person with these competences and attitudes with the expert knowledge in your organisation and you have a winning B2B sales force - even at a budget.