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Sales Leadership Recruiters Delivering Top Sales Leadership Talent

As top sales executive recruiters and veteran sales leaders, we have the sales leadership and sales-focused recruiting experience to help you hire the best sales leaders possible.

Our Recruiting Process

Passive Candidate Rate

97.23%

97% of the candidates we submit are passive (not job seekers), ensuring high-performing talent.

Sales Executive Search FAQs

Uniquely Positioned to Recruit Sales Leaders

1. Veteran Sales Leaders as Recruiters

Salestalent.com is different from other sales executive search firms in that we are operated solely by veteran sales leaders-from our founder, himself a six-time executive sales leader, to the rest of our recruiting team. Based on the idea that only a former sales leader intuitively knows what makes one good at the art of leading top sales teams, experience equips us to judge and find top sales leadership talent.

The approach ensures that clients get to interact with our executive sales headhunters who excel in sales and understand the fine points of recruiting top sales leaders. Being insiders, we have an edge in finding and attracting high performers who are not currently in the job market.

2. Passive Candidate Search

We know high-performing sales leaders are seldom looking for jobs, and this is the inefficiency of job postings alone. Our sales executive search firm does not rely on job boards; instead, we identify and engage passive candidates, those who are employed and doing well in their field. These, we know, constitute a highly valued talent pool since they tend to be high performers who are not on the active job market.

Our sales management recruiters employ a high-touch, multi-channel approach, including personalized emails, calls, and LinkedIn outreach, to establish direct contact with ‘passive candidates.’ This targeted approach enables their operations to reach out to candidates from the very top who are not necessarily actively pursuing opportunities.

3. Network strength and relevance within the target market

Our sales executive headhunters use a careful process of elimination, which ensures that the clients receive from us just a few highly qualified candidates who possess the requisite skills and experience but also would fit with the culture of the client company and its long-term goals.

4. Speedy yet Effective Recruitment Process

At SalesTalent.com we know very well that there is no time to waste in filling executive sales leadership positions. It is for this reason that our firm :

• Limits the job requisitions each recruiter handles at any one time. This approach allows for a very active and thorough search, netting faster results versus firms with recruiters handling multiple searches simultaneously.
• Has a colossal network of sales leadership talent and an internal database that has taken many years to build. Having this talent pool at their fingertips, identification and filtering are much quicker processes.
• The aim is to present our clients with 3 to 5 highly qualified candidates within two weeks of the start of the search-many times even sooner. This commitment to rapid turnaround time ensures that clients can fill critical sales leadership positions quickly, thereby minimizing any potential disruption in their sales operations.

5. Solely Focused on Sales Talent

Salestalent.com recruits exclusively for sales and sales leadership, meaning our sales search firm develops deep niche expertise in the sales domain. That allows a particular approach to provide much deeper insight into the subtlety associated with recruiting for sales, extending from compensation structures through market trends to the changing skill set required for success.

Handling complex issues in sales allows us to conceptualize market trends, compensation structures, and objectively place candidates with opportunities that better suit their needs.

6. The Complete Package.

Equipped with this immense knowledge in sales, SalesTalent.com becomes a trusted advisor and partner for businesses looking to build and scale high-performing sales teams. With a deep understanding of the sales industry, our commitment to client success has enabled us to be a valuable resource for companies seeking to hire leadership for sales executive positions.

Hiring a great sales leader is more than just industry knowledge; it is about finding candidates with the intangible trait that separates the good from the great. Here are the top three traits we see most often in great candidates listed by specific position.

Top Mistakes to Avoid When Hiring Your First VP of Sales

by SalesTalent.com CEO Mike Basso, Sales Talent Expert

Hiring your first VP of Sales is a significant turning point. It signals to the market and your investors that you’re serious about scaling. But here’s the reality: most founders blow it on this hire. Especially in SaaS, but frankly, this happens across industries. I’ve seen it more times than I can count. You plan to set up your rocket ship for a spectacular blast off with plenty of escape velocity, but instead, you fizzle out, wondering 12 months later what went wrong. Here is my breakdown of the most common and deadly mistakes I see when hiring your first VP of Sales.

Mistake #1: Hiring The Shinny Logo

One of the fastest ways to set yourself up for failure is to chase candidates from “big name logos.” Founders love hiring someone from a unicorn company or a well-known brand with a massive title. But here’s the problem—those people usually don’t know how to build from scratch without a big support structure. They’re used to managing managers, not creating sales processes from a blank slate. If you don’t already have a dialed-in sales playbook, that enterprise CRO is not going to be the person writing it for you.

Mistake #2: Over-Indexing on Industry Familiarity

Sure, industry knowledge helps. But too many founders treat it like the end-all, be-all. The truth? Your VP of Sales needs to be a sales leader first and a product expert second. Can they hire A-players? Can they coach? Can they build a pipeline without depending on inbound leads? Always hire for the skills and traits that actually move the revenue needle before industry experience. That industry expert who can’t lead and coach a top sales team won’t get you to the next level.

Mistake #3: Getting the Timing Wrong

Hiring your first VP of Sales before you achieve product-market fit is a mistake. Product market fit usually occurs around $500k to $1 million in recurring revenue. A good indication that you have achieved product fit is when you have two account executives regularly winning and closing deals outside of your network. Hiring too late can also be a mistake. If you wait too long to hire your first sales leader, you will be constantly playing catch-up and digging a hole that will be hard to recover from.

Mistake #4: Not Aligning on Role Expectations

Do you need someone closing deals with you? Or do you need someone to build the team? Those are two very different things. Too often, I see founders hire their first VP of Sales, thinking they’re getting both, only to be frustrated when the VP focuses on hiring instead of closing (or vice versa). Be brutally honest about what you need right now, not what looks good on your pitch deck.

Bottom line: The VP of Sales is the most critical early-stage hire you will make. If you get it wrong, your rocket ship will fail to attain escape velocity and fall back to Earth.

About the Author: Mike Basso is a 20-plus-year veteran sales leader and Founder and CEO of SalesTalent.com. Before founding his sales executive recruitment agency, as a six-time executive sales leader, Mike built or scaled six large sales organizations. Mike has recruited over a thousand salespeople and sales leaders in his career. Mike says he primarily owed his success as a sales leader to his ability to recruit high-performing passive sales talent.

Mike’s expert advice on executive sales recruiting is regularly quoted in media outlets such as Newsweek, Business Insider, MSN, AOL, Nasdaq, Yahoo Finance, Monster.com, HubSpot’s Sales Blog, Jobscan, Jobvite, JazzHR, and many more. You can learn more about Mike Basso by visiting linkedin.com/in/salestalent/

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If you want to hire top sales leadership talent, leverage our specialized experience and exhaustive search process to find the best talent possible. Contact us today to learn how our executive sales recruiters can help you find the top sales leadership talent you need to succeed.