A bad sales hire costs more than the salary. It costs the leads he burned, the months you spent hoping, and the conclusion you drew afterward — usually the wrong one.
The pattern is familiar. Owner hires a rep who interviewed well. Rep closes at half the owner’s rate. Owner assumes a training problem, spends four months on it, rep leaves. Owner concludes nobody can sell like he can and goes back to running appointments himself.
The conclusion is wrong and expensive. The hire failed for reasons that were visible before it happened.
What does not predict performance
Industry experience. The most overrated screen in home services. A rep with eight years in roofing arrives with eight years of someone else’s habits, half of which you will have to remove first. Experience is useful. It is not predictive.
A great interview. Interviewing well is a skill closely adjacent to selling, which is why it fools people. It measures how someone performs in a conversation where they know the topic, control the narrative, and face no objections. That is not the job.
Confidence. Frequently negatively correlated. The most confident candidate is often the one least willing to be coached, and coachability is the whole thing.
What does
Coachability. The single strongest predictor. Can this person take a correction, apply it immediately, and not need their ego managed through it?
Work ethic that predates you. Not what they say about hard work — what they have actually done. Two jobs through school. A sport they were not naturally good at. Something that required showing up when nobody was watching.
Genuine curiosity about people. Sales in the home is diagnosis before it is persuasion. A candidate who asks you nothing during the interview will ask a homeowner nothing in their kitchen.
Comfort with rejection. Ask about the last significant thing they failed at and listen to whether the failure is theirs in the telling, or someone else’s.
The step that predicts better than anything else
Make them do the job in the interview.
Not a hypothetical. An actual roleplay, in the second interview.
Give them fifteen minutes and one product fact sheet. Tell them you will be a homeowner. Then run a real appointment segment — and object. Give them the three estimates objection. Give them price.
You are not evaluating whether they handle it well. They will not; they have been here fifteen minutes.
You are evaluating what happens next. Stop them mid-roleplay, give one specific correction, and run it again.
That second run is the entire hiring decision. A coachable candidate visibly incorporates the note — often clumsily, which is fine. An uncoachable one does the same thing again, or explains why their original approach was correct.
No résumé, reference, or personality assessment tells you this. Fifteen minutes of roleplay does.
What to say in the offer
Be specific about the training expectation, because it is unusual and it self-selects.
“One thing you should know: we train an hour a day, every day. Roleplay, film review, objection drills. Some people love it and some find it exhausting. Which do you think you’d be?”
The candidate who lights up at that is your hire. The one who visibly deflates was going to quit in month four anyway, and you have found out for free. See the Power Hour for what they are agreeing to.
The first ninety days
Most sales hires fail in onboarding, not in hiring.
- Ride along before they run appointments. Five minimum. They watch, then they debrief with you.
- Give them a documented process, not a pep talk. If your process lives in your head, you cannot hand it to anyone — the first lesson of the O’Leary story.
- Protect their first leads. Do not hand a new rep your worst list. A rep who goes 0-for-12 on bad leads learns they cannot sell.
- Measure skill weekly, outcome monthly. Close rate lags too far behind to coach against.
The distinction between correcting and developing is covered in sales training vs. sales coaching.
Full media record: Chuck Thokey: In the Media.