Presented at Inbound 2025 San Francisco on September 3, 2025
Remember that time you didn't listen to your gut? Your intuition? What happened?
Then think of the time(s) you heard a data point or statistic and ignored it. Didn't believe it?
We need BOTH data and intuition to build a sales team. Here are some of the details I discussed in this session.
Gut vs. Science
Let's Hear it for the Soft Skills
What the Data Reveals
It Takes Work to be Mediocre
Exercises & Resources:
Create a hiring scorecard and a highly structured interview process for sales rep candidates
Create a consistent onboarding process
Create a professional development plan
Be able to tell new sales hires what a path to promotion might look like (path A, path B)
Know your metrics:
What percent of your sales team is hitting quota today?
What percentage of your qualified leads become opportunities?
What percentage of your leads are inbound? referral? outbound?
Takeaways on hiring sellers:
Resumes, CVs and LinkedIn profiles are not predictive of sales success
You need a combination of references, strong interview process - highly structured, and a multi-measure sales specific assessment.
We all have biases as humans so we need to include more people in the hiring process and look for strong candidates that may not be just like us.
Soft Skills we need in our Agentic-AI Era:
Empathy
Communication
Listening
Collaboration
Creative Problem Solving
Ability to See Patterns
Coachability
Emotional Intelligence. AI can't "read the room" (yet!)
The Data Set Used in Discussing the 21 Core Sales Competencies
Is over 2.4M people who took an pre-hire sales assessment or were evaluated within their sales team through our partner, OMG.
The pre-hire assessment looks at:
TACTICAL competencies: can they reach decision makers, for example? (these can be taught)
MINDSET competencies: we call "Sales DNA" and includes things like dealing with rejection and whether someone thinks and speaks about supportive beliefs, or limiting beliefs.
GRIT competencies (the Will to Sell) - doing anything possible (that's legal and ethical) to be successful.
Of the 2.4M people surveyed in this data set, only 16% of sellers were top performers (meaning: they are 4x more likely to exceed the expected win rate)
Frustration with Many Sales Reps:
They are mediocre, not trying hard. Not interested in success or at least won't put the work on for it.
Frustration with Many Sales Managers:
They won't (or don't know how to) hold reps on their team accountable.
More Information about the 21 Core Sales Competencies
White Paper (asks for name, email, and title. We won't spam you)
"Make it Happen" Podcast with John Barrows - Lori is the guest on this episode
Lori Richardson is Founder & CEO of Score More Sales, a top B2B sales strategy firm helping mid-sized companies grow revenues by solving key sales issues - like recruiting, retention, building an inclusive sales team, process, pipeline, and leadership. Lori is also the President of Women Sales Pros - a community created to increase the number of women in sales, as well as in AI-powered and sales leadership roles. She speaks to CEOs on topics such as sales growth, the power of mindset, and the importance and value of a strong sales culture. Clients include companies in the technology, telecom, manufacturing, distribution, and professional services industries. Salesforce named Lori a Top Sales Influencer in 2021 -2025. Lori has been named a top sales influencer over the years by LinkedIn as well as many other companies and organizations. Her book, She Sells is on hiring more women for B2B sales roles. Subscribe to the award-winning blog, follow her on Instagram, X, and LinkedIn – plus elsewhere here.