→ Field Notes

Will over skill: the part of a salesperson you cannot coach

I have hired salespeople who ran a flawless demo and missed every number, and others who fumbled the script and crushed quota. After thirty years and three exits, that stopped surprising me. The difference is almost never skill.

The thing the resume hides

A resume records what someone has done, the logos, the titles, the numbers they can claim. None of it tells you whether they will get out of bed on the third no of the morning and make the fourth call. The interview hides it too, because everyone is motivated for an hour in a conference room.

The competency that predicts whether a seller produces is the one Objective Management Group calls Will to Sell: desire, commitment, outlook, the willingness to own the outcome. It is the part that keeps working when no one is watching. And it is the hardest thing to install after you have made the hire.

The drive has to be there before the offer

Hunting, qualifying, consultative questions, closing, these are skills. They respond to training. Give a coachable rep a method and the reps to practice it, and the skills come. I have watched mediocre technique turn sharp inside a quarter.

Drive does not move the same way. You can lift someone's outlook for a week with a good conversation. But the rep who is comfortable at 80 percent of quota, who needs the deal to come to them, drifts back to that level the moment you stop pushing. You cannot be their motivation at scale. No manager can.

What this changes about hiring

Once you believe it, you stop interviewing for polish. Polish is a tactical skill, and a candidate who interviews well has practiced the interview. You screen for the engine first: the will, then the wiring underneath it. How they handle rejection. Whether they are comfortable talking about money. Whether they need to be liked in order to function.

A sales-specific assessment surfaces all of it before the offer, the one point where the information is still cheap. I run every candidate through one. Not to replace my judgment, but to show me where my judgment is about to be wrong.

The team you already have

The same lens works backward. When a rep is underperforming, the instinct is to send them to training. Training is the wrong fix as often as the right one. A rep stuck on a belief will not improve with technique, and a rep missing the technique will not improve with a pep talk. Treat the wrong layer and you lose a quarter, sometimes a year.

Measure first. Then you know whether you are looking at a rep who needs a method, a rep who needs a belief reset, or a rep who is in the wrong job.

The best hire I ever made

He interviewed worse than the candidate I passed on. He wanted it more, and he owned every outcome from his first week. The numbers followed within two quarters. Hire for will. You can teach the rest.