Should you prioritise product knowledge or leadership skills when hiring a new sales leader?
I’ve seen this debate play out countless times when businesses are hiring sales leaders.
One candidate knows your product category inside out. They understand the market, the competitors and the technical detail and they’ve probably spent years selling into exactly the customers you’re targeting.
Another doesn’t have quite the same depth of product knowledge but they have a proven track record of building, developing and leading high-performing sales teams.
Which one do you choose?
For me, leadership skills should outweigh product knowledge. And this is why.
Product knowledge can be learnt
I’m not suggesting product knowledge doesn’t matter. It absolutely does. But it’s also something that can be taught.
Give a good sales leader proper onboarding, access to your product team and time with customers and they can get under the skin of what you sell, why people buy it and where it sits against the competition.
The same can be true of vertical experience. Whether you’re selling into retail, construction, automotive or another specialist market, being familiar with the sector is obviously useful. But I’d be careful about making experience in your exact niche a non-negotiable unless there’s a very good reason for it.
The more boxes you insist on ticking, the smaller your candidate market becomes. And you could end up overlooking some very good people in the process.
Leadership is a different skill altogether
Good sales leadership is much harder to teach.
Coaching someone through a difficult quarter, knowing when to challenge and when to support, setting a clear direction for the team and getting people to genuinely buy into it all take experience.
Then there’s hiring, performance management, forecasting, creating accountability and building the sort of sales culture where good people actually want to stay.
You don’t pick all of that up during a two-week onboarding programme.
And ultimately, that’s what you’re hiring a sales leader to do. Their job isn’t necessarily to be the best salesperson or biggest product expert in the room. It’s to get the best out of the people around them.
Be careful with the ‘perfect candidate’
This is where I think SaaS businesses can sometimes make life unnecessarily difficult for themselves.
The brief starts with needing a great sales leader. Then comes experience of the exact vertical. Then the same customer profile. Similar deal sizes. The right sales methodology. Perhaps experience at the same stage of growth or with precisely the same type of product.
Individually, they may all sound perfectly reasonable. Collectively, you can end up describing a very small group of people.
That doesn’t mean you should compromise on the things that genuinely matter. But it is worth separating what someone needs to bring with them at the outset from what they can learn once they join you.
For me, leadership sits firmly in the first camp.
Hire for what’s difficult to teach
If I had to choose between a brilliant sales leader who needs to learn the product and a product expert who needs to learn how to lead, I know which way I’d go.
Product and vertical knowledge can be built. Great leadership is much harder to manufacture.
So when you’re putting together the brief for your next sales leader, don’t just ask who knows your world best.
Ask who you'd trust to get the best out of the people in it.