Industrial Revenue Growth
Book 15 Min

Why Your Sales Hiring Keeps Failing™

Resumes and traditional interviews predict sales success at 18 percent. A field guide for middle-market industrial CEOs and PE partners on why half of new sales hires never become consistent producers, and what a better system looks like.

Each failed hire costs roughly a million dollars all-in, and the process that selected them rarely gets scrutinized, so it repeats every 18 to 24 months. The guide lays out an 11 step engineered process built on sales-specific assessment with 91 percent predictive accuracy.

Download the field guide

Ungated. No form, no gate, no follow up sequence. Download it, or send it to whoever needs to see it.

18%
Predictive accuracy of a resume. The traditional interview that follows it scores exactly the same.

Top decile reps outperform the bottom decile by 619 percent. Hiring from the right tail of that distribution is the entire point.

You are making million dollar bets with the accuracy of a coin flip.

The standard process feels rigorous: a posting, a resume screen, interviews, an offer to whoever the team liked best. Resumes predict sales success at 18 percent. Unstructured interviews, the same. The personality and behavioral assessments most companies add run 20 to 22 percent.

The result is that half of new hires never become consistent producers, and a single failed hire runs to roughly $937,000 all-in: salary, selling expenses, recruiting fees, and 27 months of an impaired territory. Meanwhile only 31 percent of B2B reps attained quota in 2024, and 17 percent of reps generate 81 percent of all revenue.

The guide's answer is a sales-specific, multi-measurement assessment deployed before any resume review, validated on 2.4 million assessed salespeople, with 91 percent predictive accuracy, inside an 11 step engineered hiring process. 72 percent of candidates it recommends reach the top half of their team within 12 months. Zero percent of the candidates it rejects ever do.

Primary CTA · 15 Minutes · No Pitch · No Sequence

Want Ed to walk through it with you?

Fifteen minutes. Bring your last sales hire that did not work out, or the territory you are about to fill. Ed will walk through where the standard process fails and what an engineered one changes. No pitch, no proposal cycle, no follow up automation, and a referral if he is not the right fit.

An honest read on your sales team. In 15 minutes.

No pitch deck. No proposal cycle. No follow-up automation. Ed asks sharp diagnostic questions about your organic growth challenge and gives you an honest read on what's actually happening.

  • A clear next step, a better referral, or a few things you can do this week
  • Ed's read on whether your sales problem is people, process, or strategy
  • If Ed isn't the right fit, he'll tell you who is
Ed Marsh, industrial sales growth advisor, in a casual button-up shirt
Ed Marsh
Consultant · Speaker · Director · Author · Veteran
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