How deep is your sales team’s bench?
Every sales leader I talk to wants more top-of-funnel in the sales pipeline. But the funnel that determines next year’s numbers is more likely to be full of candidates, not deals, and most frontline managers don’t have one.
When Salesloft and Benchmarkit surveyed 264 revenue leaders in 2023, 55% named pipeline generation the top challenge to revenue growth. We’ve built whole departments around that problem: SDRs, sequences, intent data, and a pipeline review every Monday.
Ask about open headcount, and you hear the same pain in a different pipeline. Gartner polled sales directors, VPs, and C-suite executives in late 2023, and 60% said talent attraction and recruitment stood in the way of their priorities. That pipeline doesn’t get a Monday review.
In most companies I work with, the candidate funnel opens when someone quits and closes the day an offer gets signed.
The Patriots hired for traits
In 2019, the Boston Herald noticed something odd about the New England Patriots. About a fifth of the roster had grown up in military or law enforcement families. Jack Easterby, the team’s character coach at the time, said most teams would be lucky to have two or three players from that kind of background.
Nick Caserio, who ran player personnel, described what the scouts looked for: “How do they handle adversity? How do they handle transition? You’re looking for patterns of behavior.”
My read is that the family pattern was a byproduct. Those households tend to build the traits the Patriots screened hard for, like putting the team above yourself. Keep in mind, this was the same front office that won six Super Bowls in 18 seasons.
Most sales teams hire from the résumé
When I sit down with sales leaders, I rarely find a structured hiring process. If there’s an ideal candidate profile, it lists years of experience and an industry. It almost never lists the traits the team’s top performers share, because nobody sat down and took the time to figure those out.
When it comes to the interview, very few managers know how to run a behavioral one. They ask, “How would you handle a prospect who goes dark?” The candidate gives a great answer, because imagining is easy.
Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, so the better question is, “Tell me about the last prospect who went dark. What did you do, and what happened?”
That answer is an EAR, meaning example, action, and result. A good interview collects as many EARs as it can.
Run hiring like a deal pipeline
David Skok, the Matrix Partners venture capitalist, made this case to founders years ago. “Recruiting is a funnel process,” he wrote, and “the hardest part of recruiting is the top of the funnel.”
Sales leaders already know how to run a funnel. Most of us only point it at deals.
The mechanics are the ones you already demand from your reps.
- Build an ideal candidate profile from your best people.
- Keep an evergreen posting live.
- Hold exploratory conversations every month, whether you have open headcount or not.
You never know when someone will pop smoke. A rep goes out on three months of parental leave, takes a promotion, or takes a recruiter’s call.
Without a bench, managers hang on to C players because replacing them feels like a six-month project. One company told me recently that a manager has had a seat open for 9 months.
Now picture the manager who interviewed an A player two days ago. That manager walks into the one-on-one with the C player differently, and both of them know it’s an expensive seat.
We’ve turned a lot of managers into zoo bears. Recruiting fed them candidates through the gate for years, and now we want them to teach their cubs to hunt.
Companies don’t outperform their managers, and managers can’t outperform their talent bench.
So when did your managers last interview someone for a seat that wasn’t open? How many names are on their bench right now?
Put your AI Chief of Staff in the interview
CoachEm’s AI already watches whether managers do the work that moves the number, and building a candidate pipeline is part of that work. It tracks whether each manager holds exploratory interviews and keeps the bench full.
It can also sit in on the interview and brief the manager afterward, the same way it briefs them after a sales call. A debrief might read: “The candidate talked less than you did. You asked four open-ended questions, and we look for closer to twenty. You collected one EAR. Three of your questions asked how they would handle something, which tells you how well they imagine.”
Then it compares the candidate’s answers against the job spec and flags where they fall short. The manager makes the hiring call, while AI chief of staff makes sure they make it on evidence.
Your next move…
Before your next pipeline review, ask each frontline manager to name three people they’d hire tomorrow if a seat opened. Count the names. Divide your turnover rate by that count to get the real chance of hitting your number next year.
