They say never buy a pet for Christmas. There’s an Australian expression, “you bought a dog”, that means you bought a lemon or a dud. You bought something that turns out to be worthless, a bad investment, or a complete disappointment relative to what was promised. You got ripped off. The puppy looks cute, but a mangey mutt follows you around for 20 years.
Most companies hiring a new sales rep have very little notion of what a landmine field they are walking into. At Outsold we call it the 100K gamble. In many cases, for a small business, you are literally better off taking your hundred thousand dollars to the casino, putting it on red and spinning the roulette wheel. The salesperson you are about to hire, has significantly worse odds of a return on invesment than a 50% chance to double your money.
You probably wouldn’t drop a hundred thousand on one spin of the roulette wheel.
These are some fundamental ideas you need to think about before you hire a salesperson.
The sheep in wolf’s clothing
Also called sales ghosts. On the outside they look like a hard lone wolf with the grit to run down a moose for 3 days, but inside they are just another sheeple.
References
If you were spending 100K on a car you would buy some car magazines, ask a few mates, do some AI research, but many reps get hired on spec. Additionally most KPI and sales targets are arbitrary and completely irrelevant.
No ROI
The majority of reps do not produce a single dollar of profit. In fact they are a cost.
The data backs up the pattern. Ebsta and Pavilion’s 2025 research found just 14% of sellers drive more than 80% of new revenue. And the surveys can’t even agree on how many reps hit quota. Depending on who is counting, it’s anywhere from about one in five to about six in ten.
The Google test
Put your job ad next to Google’s. Which would you apply to? You need to remember that sales is the easiest to switch industry. Your small business is competing with Google, where they not only get the Google logo on their resume, 150K, they get sleep pods, mindfulness training, gourmet buffets and food.
Speed to market
B-tier salespeople are on the market days. A-tier salespeople are on the market for hours. In fact the best salespeople are headhunted and never enter the market. If you are taking weeks in your recruitment process your best candidates are probably C-tier or worse.
Reference No ROI – less than 14% of reps (the A-Tier) produce 80% of all sales. The remaining 86% or sales peeps account for 20% of total sales.
Loaf of bread test
There is no formal qualification for a salesperson. In fact the vast majority have zero formal training. The loaf of bread test means that while you need a licence to drive a car, or catch a fish, it’s easier to qualify as a salesperson than to buy a loaf of bread.
Unedumacatable
50% of sales reps have zero improvement from any level of training. They are categorically incapable of learning and they will repeat the same failed process.
Sales playbooks
Most companies have no formal process written down, so they are hoping the rep will know what they are doing (please see the loaf of bread test).
Low motivation
The primary question to ask is not CAN they do the job, it is always WILL they do the job.
Salespeople’s job is market research
If you have bad Google, Reddit or Glassdoor reviews, a good rep will uncover it in minutes and qualify you out.
Salespeople are master manipulators
It’s a salesperson’s job to negotiate and convince. We are excellent at telling you what you want to hear. When they can’t pay rent they will do some top shelf convincing in the interview. Ironaically after they have a job that urgency goes away in weeks. (See the Dunning-Kreuger effect)
Interviews are the opposite of sales
A salesperson that interviews well is probably a bad salesperson. Think about it. Sales is all about putting the prospect first. It’s a support role to the prospect being the leading actor. An interview is about putting yourself first.
No KPI
If you don’t know your KPI, your CAC, your LTV and the break even point on the sales hire, you are throwing money away. Period.
Closing leads
A salesperson’s job is to take a lead through a pitch, a proposal, a negotiation and onto onboarding. Do you have 5,000 highly qualified prospects with mobile numbers and a steady flow of leads to work on? You may be putting the cart before the horse.
Fully loaded cost
Take your base, add super, car and travel, tools and subscriptions, and work out the fully loaded cost. Say you offer a $90K base. Super alone is now 12%, which takes you to $100,800 before the car, the laptop, the CRM, the leads, payroll tax once your wage bill passes the threshold in your state, workers’ compensation and the hours of whoever has to manage them.
Your fully loaded cost on a 90K rep is probably closer to 120K.
If you work on a 20% profit margin that is a sales target of $600K per annum. Just to get to break even, on the cost of the rep, let alone the rest of your staff and operation.
How many sales is that?
Recruit, train, manage
Who is recruiting, onboarding, training and managing the salesperson, and what is the implicit cost of their/ your time?
Underwater
Sales can take 6 months to get to sale one. That ain’t free. Sales is a cost like any other department until (if) the sausage machine works. In The Bridge Group’s 2026 research on B2B account executives, the average new starter took 6.2 months to reach full productivity.
The sales recruitment merry-go-round
3 months to recruit a salesperson, 3 months to onboard and get them working, 3 months to realise you bought a dog, 3 months to manage them out. Now you’re 12 months later back in November, you wasted an average 15 hours a week training, you’re 120K in the hole, with no sales and now you are placing another job ad. Sucker.
Not only are Australian employment laws genuinely scary. The more you’ve already spent, the harder it feels to walk away, which psychologists call the sunk cost trap. The longer they stay the more you probably like them.
The empty chair
In Australia the average cost of an empty sales seat is 20K per month in lost opportunity.
A bad hire costs even more.
Replacement
Then there’s the bill for replacing them. Gallup estimates that replacing an employee costs between half and two times their annual salary, and calls that a conservative estimate.
Sale one inequation
Working out your KPI needs multiple years of sales activity. You can’t work out your maths with a denominator of one.
At least a third of CVs are false
Every CV says top performer and 120% of target, but what target? Set by who? Oftentimes a big logo means an easy sell. Like our mate who got the job at Google, do you think those were tough sales, or did the brand do the heavy lifting?
Australian surveys back this up. In two surveys of about 1,000 Australians each, 33% and 42% admitted lying on a resume. The 42% survey, by StandOut Resume, also found the people who lied earned $15,000 more on average, and three quarters of them said they were never caught. A Robert Half survey of 460 Australian hiring managers found 68% had ruled candidates out after catching exaggeration, most often about work experience.
The Bunnings-Loser Effect
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with low ability, skill, or knowledge in a specific domain greatly overestimate their competence.
At Outsold we call itThe Bunnings-Loser Effect: An overconfident awful sales person that bought their playbook on sale at Bunnings.
Shameless plug
At Outsold we offer 3 core things.
1. Getting you sales ready
2. Doing the actual sales work
3. Training and improving sales.
More of this kind of thinking lives at www.outsold.com.au/blogs.
The research behind this
Hiring methods. Sackett and colleagues’ 2022 re-analysis of Schmidt and Hunter’s 1998 meta-analysis put structured interviews at 0.42 (down from 0.51), unstructured interviews at 0.19 (down from 0.38) and years of experience at 0.07 (down from 0.18). Squaring a validity figure gives the share of performance differences it explains, roughly 18%, 4% and under 1%.
Sales rep benchmarks. The Bridge Group’s 2026 account executive research (158 B2B companies) found an average ramp of 6.2 months. Its 2025 SDR research (351 companies) found 60% of SDRs at quota, a 3.0 month ramp and an average tenure of 1.9 years. RepVue’s Q2 2025 index put about 43% of SaaS reps at quota, and Ebsta and Pavilion’s 2025 research found 78% of sellers missed quota and 14% drive over 80% of new revenue. Most of this data comes from North American B2B tech, and the surveys define quota differently, which is part of why the numbers disagree.
Cost of replacing an employee. Gallup, 2019: between half and two times annual salary.
Super. The superannuation guarantee has been 12% of ordinary time earnings since 1 July 2025.
CV honesty. Surveys of about 1,000 Australians each found 33% and 42% admitted lying on a resume (the latter by StandOut Resume). Robert Half surveyed 460 Australian hiring managers: 68% had ruled out a candidate over dishonest or exaggerated information, and the most common area was work experience (60%).
The seller knows more than the buyer. George Akerlof’s 1970 paper “The Market for Lemons” showed how a buyer who can’t judge quality ends up paying for the lemons. The candidate knows how good they are. You don’t.
Risk and uncertainty. Economists since Frank Knight in 1921 have separated risk, where you know the odds, from uncertainty, where you don’t. Roulette is risk. Hiring a salesperson is uncertainty.
The sunk cost trap. Arkes and Blumer, 1985: people keep investing in a failing choice because of what they have already put in.
Interviews are ineffective. The research agrees that interviews are a poor guide. A 2022 re-analysis of the hiring research found an ordinary unstructured interview predicts job performance at just 0.19, on a scale where 0 is no better than guessing and 1 is perfect. Years of experience scored 0.07. Even the best method on the table, a properly structured interview, only reached 0.42. In plain terms, the best hiring method we have explains about 18% of why one hire outperforms another. The unstructured chat most small businesses run explains about 4%.
