Free download: The Sales Hiring Playbook by Steli Efti

Building a high-performing sales team is hard. And it starts with hiring the right people. I've been doing this for about 15 years now in various industries, and there's plenty I've learned. I put it all down in a book and am sharing it with you today, totally free.

If you're growing a sales team, this book is for you. Here are just some of the things I cover:

• When to hire the sales people (and equally important, when not to hire them)
• How to assess the culture fit of a job candidate (and 7 reasons why you should never hire a bad culture fit no matter how much revenue they could bring in!)
• What personality traits to look for in sales reps
• How to hire "rejection-proof" sales people
• Where to find the best sales people for your team (it's not where most people are looking)
• How to recruit people who are so good they shouldn't want to join your team
• The top 10 interview questions to ask candidates... and why their answers don't really matter that much. (I also share what you should look for instead during the interviewing process.)
• 3 things you should request from every job candidate before extending an offer
• Red flags to watch out for. (Ignore them at your own peril. A failed sales hire will cost you tens of thousands of dollars.)
• Why underdogs make for the best hires... IF you train and manage them the right way (I'll show you how)
• How to structure your sales teams for maximum effectiveness
• Why good process beats great talent in the long run (and how to design a great process for your sales organization)
• How to minimize ramp up time for new reps (you also get a day-by-day onboarding schedule)
• ... and much more :)

Why am I giving this book away for free?

First of all, because it helps my company to get more customers. We're selling software for inside sales teams. Our marketing strategy from day one has been all about content marketing. Sharing sales advice has worked tremendously well for us.

But there's more to it. My team and I invested hundreds of hours and a lot of energy into the creation of this book. We chunked it down by turning the chapters out as individual blog posts, and you can find them all in the archives of the Close blog.

But the reason why we share our knowledge so freely is because we want you to succeed. We want you to learn from our mistakes, so that you can skip them. We've seen too many great teams with great ideas fail, simply because they didn't know how to get customers.

Building a sales team is a special point in the life of a startup: lots of potential for tremendous growth. But you're also a lot more likely to crash and burn. The stakes are so much higher. You need to get things right.

If the advice you find in this book helps you to build a better sales team, do me a favor and tell me about it. That means much more to me than whatever the proceeds of book sales would buy me.

And now go get'em!