Sales Hiring Brief

Sales Hiring Brief

One package per role: brief → scorecard → interview kit → test task → 30/60/90. Built for service companies, where a bad sales hire costs a quarter, not a sprint.

Answer in the user's language. Table labels below are in English; translate them for the output if the team works in another language.

Rule zero: the role needs a job before it needs a person

Before writing anything, answer three questions. If any is unanswered, the hire is premature, and saying so is the finding:

1. What number does this role move? A named metric, its current value, its target value.
2. What exists for them to work with? A contact base, a playbook, an offer, a case library, or nothing? An SDR hired into an empty toolkit fails because of the company's gap, not their own.
3. Who do they report to, and who reviews their work every week? No reviewer, no hire.

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1. Role brief

Block	Content
Why this role	the gap in one sentence, tied to a number
What it owns	3-5 outcomes, each with its metric
What it does NOT do	explicit: this is where service-company roles go wrong; name the work that stays with someone else
First 90 days	one sentence describing success
Works with	daily, weekly, and who signs off
Market and pay range	the range and the reasoning (level, market, remote or office)
Where we search	2-3 channels, most specific first

Ranges must be real. A range inflated to look attractive brings candidates who leave in month two.

2. Scorecard: six weighted axes

Set the weights per role before seeing any candidate, never after. Score each axis 1-5, multiply by the weight, sum. One number per candidate, comparable across the whole funnel.

Axis	What it reads
Relevant experience	has done this exact job in a comparable context (B2B services differ from product and from retail)
Evidence of results	can name their numbers and how they got them; separates the operator from the passenger
Self-direction	built something without a ready process, or only ran one
Language and communication	the languages the role sells in, at the level it sells at
Learning speed	picks up a new domain quickly, which matters in technical niches (engineering, GIS, construction)
Culture fit	direct, peer-level, works without supervision

Default weights (percent), as a starting point to adjust:

Role	Experience	Results	Self-direction	Language	Learning	Culture
SDR	15	20	15	25	15	10
BDM / sales	20	30	15	15	10	10
Marketing manager	15	25	25	10	15	10

Change them when the role differs and write down why. Threshold: below 3.5 out of 5 weighted, no offer, however likeable the candidate.

Every score carries one line of evidence. A score without evidence is a feeling.

3. Interview kit

Two rounds. Round 1 screens for the operator, round 2 for fit with the actual work.

Round 1: evidence, 45 minutes. Structure each question as: past situation → what they did personally → where the number moved → what they would change. Ask for the number FIRST, then the method. People who inherited their results can describe the method but stall on the number.

Mandatory questions:

• "Take a campaign you were personally responsible for. How many touches, how many replies, how many meetings?"
• "What did not work in the last year, and why?" No answer means no reflection, and no reflection means slow growth.
• "What did you do when the contact base was exhausted or the leads ran out?"
• Role-specific: for an SDR, how they build a list; for a BDM, how they lose deals; for marketing, what they published and what it produced.

Round 2: the work, 45 minutes. Walk through the test task together. Probe the choices, not the output.

Red flags: results only in percentages with no absolute numbers; "the team did it" for every achievement; no failure they own; frameworks quoted with no example; needs the whole process handed to them.

4. Test task: paid, 2-3 hours, realistic

Never unpaid, never a week long, never the company's real backlog disguised as a test. One task per role, evaluated against a written key of 4-5 criteria that the candidate sees in advance.

Role	Task	What it reads
SDR / head of outbound	build 20 accounts for a given ICP, name the buying signal for each, write one first-touch message	data sourcing, signal thinking, writing
BDM / sales	listen to a recorded discovery call (or read a transcript): qualification verdict, next step, what was missed	qualification, judgement
Marketing manager	teardown of the company's own page plus 3 concrete changes with reasons	diagnosis over decoration
Account manager	given an account's facts: health read, renewal risk, next action	sense for risk

Default evaluation key: reasoning quality 40, data accuracy 25, writing 20, on time and in format 15.

5. Onboarding: 30/60/90

Window	Goal	Done when
Days 0-30	context loaded	knows the ICP, the offers and the proof library; can explain what the company sells and to whom without help; has shadowed real work
Days 31-60	supervised output	runs the motion with every artifact reviewed; first own numbers on the board
Days 61-90	independent	owns the metric from the brief; work reviewed weekly, not item by item

Each window needs a named reviewer, a weekly checkpoint, and a written go / no-go decision at day 90. A no-go at day 90 is a cheap decision; at day 180 it is an expensive one.

List what the hire needs on day 1: playbook, ICP document, case library, tool access. If these do not exist, building them is a prerequisite of the hire, not the hire's first task.

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Process

1. Answer rule zero. If it fails, say so and stop: that is the finding.
2. Write the brief. Confirm the pay range and the search channels with the user.
3. Set the weights, then build the scorecard template.
4. Assemble the interview kit and the test task with its key.
5. Build the 30/60/90 with named reviewers.
6. Edit the prose for AI tells; if installed, use anticopywriting-ai (pack gtm-skills).
7. Ship the package:
   • as a Notion page, if a Notion connector is available;
   • otherwise as a markdown document (or .docx via the docx skill, if the user prefers).
8. When CVs arrive, score them on the same card and output a ranked table with evidence per axis.

Keep the package generic enough to reuse: no candidate personal data in shared templates, and no names of other companies' employees in examples.

Related skills (optional, if installed)

• capacity-plan (pack gtm-strategy-skills): confirms the team actually needs another person.
• revenue-forecast-writer (pack gtm-strategy-skills): the forecast that shows which hire closes the gap.
• icp-builder (pack outbound-engine-skills): the ICP document the SDR test task is built on.

Credits

Built by Victor Shulga for B2B service companies.