How many stages does your AE process have? Do you know what each one is for? And if two of your interviewers disagreed about a candidate tomorrow, could you say which of them was assessing the right thing?
Most sales hiring processes are not designed. They accumulate. Someone adds a stage after a bad hire, nobody removes one after a good one, and eventually you have six conversations that all cover the same ground and none that test the work.
So here is what a process worth running actually looks like, stage by stage.
Start with the Motion, not the Stages
Before you decide who interviews and in what order, write down what the person will actually be selling and how.
Deal size. Cycle length. Who signs. Where the pipeline comes from.
That last one does most of the work. An AE who has spent three years converting inbound at a well-known brand and an AE who has spent three years cold-building a territory are not the same hire, even if their numbers look identical on paper. If you have not decided which one you need, no amount of interviewing will save you, because you will end up picking whoever interviews best.
Write the motion down in four or five lines. Everything after this hangs off it.
Stage one: The Conversation about what they have actually run
Not a competency interview. A conversation.
You are trying to work out whether their experience maps onto your motion, and the way to do that is to get specific fast.
Which accounts did they target, and why those.
What did the first touch look like.
How many of their closed deals started with them rather than with marketing.
What was the largest deal they ran end to end, and what nearly killed it.
Reps who have genuinely built pipeline answer these without pausing. They remember the accounts. They remember the objection that came up in three deals running. Reps who have always sat on a full inbound queue tend to drift towards process language - talking about the team, the methodology, the tooling - because the specifics are not theirs to remember.
That difference is usually visible inside fifteen minutes, and it is worth more than any scored competency framework.
Stage two: The work sample
This is the stage most teams skip, and it is the one that tells you the most.
It does not need to be elaborate.
A discovery call role-play against a realistic buyer persona.
Or a short written account plan for a target you actually care about.
Forty minutes of someone doing the job in front of you beats three hours of them describing it.
What you are watching for is not polish. Plenty of weak Reps are excellent at the polished version. You are watching whether they ask questions before they pitch, whether they can hold a conversation when the buyer does not cooperate, and whether they think in terms of the buyer's problem or their own product.
Give them the brief in advance. You are not testing improvisation, you are testing thinking.
Stage three: The peer conversation
Someone who will work alongside them, not above them.
This does two things. It gives you a read from a person who knows exactly what the job involves day to day, and it gives the candidate a chance to ask the questions they will not ask a hiring manager. Good reps use this stage to work out whether the pipeline story they have been told is true. Let them.
If your team is small enough that the peer is also the manager, use a customer-facing colleague instead. Someone from CS or solutions will spot things a sales interview will not.
And then Stop
Three stages.
Maybe a short final conversation with a Founder if that matters to the way you hire.
Every stage beyond that is a chance to lose someone for a reason that has nothing to do with fit. Good Reps are almost always in another process at the same time, and the market rewards speed more than thoroughness at this level. If you genuinely cannot decide after three well-designed stages, the problem is the design, not the amount of evidence.
Brief your Interviewers properly
This is the cheapest fix on the list and the one most often missed.
If two people on the panel are assessing different things, you do not have a process, you have a collection of opinions. Before the first interview, agree who is testing what. One person on motion fit. One on the work. One on how they will land in the team. Write it down and send it round.
Then debrief separately before anyone shares a view. The first opinion voiced in a debrief pulls the rest of the room towards it, every time.
Decide the bar before you meet anyone
Write down the four or five things this person has to be able to do in their first year. Not attributes - things they have to be able to do.
Do it before the first CV lands, because once you have met a few people the bar quietly becomes whoever you liked most. That is a different thing entirely, and it is how teams end up with a group of reps who interview brilliantly and sell inconsistently.
The part nobody wants to hear
A well-designed process will not rescue a badly-defined role. If you have not agreed what the job is, three stages will produce a confident decision about the wrong person just as reliably as six will.
Most of the sales searches we see go wrong were broken before anyone was sourced. The brief said "AE, SaaS, five years" and left everything that matters unsaid.
So before you book the first interview, ask the awkward question: if this person hits their number in twelve months, what exactly did they do to get there? If the room cannot answer that in a sentence, the process is not the thing to fix yet.
We recruit AEs, SDRs and the wider commercial team for B2B software companies across the UK, the US and Europe, and a good deal of that work is helping teams answer that question before the search starts.
If you are about to open a role and you are not completely sure what you are hiring against, that is the conversation worth having first.
Book a call and we will work through it with you.
