The short version:
Some technical sales appointments don't fail because the person lacks ability - they fail because they accepted a role that was never accurately explained.
A more honest qualification process helps both sides understand what the job actually involves, and what success should realistically look like.
Hiring an experienced technical salesperson, particularly someone currently working for an engineering competitor - usually starts with selling them the opportunity.
Why should they leave an established position? Will they earn more? Are the products stronger? Will they get greater autonomy, a better territory, a genuine path to progress?
Those conversations are necessary. Strong Sales Engineers, Technical Sales Managers and Business Development Managers aren't sitting around waiting for the next vacancy to appear. If you want to attract them, you need a reason worth listening to.
At some point, though, the conversation has to change.
The business needs to move from selling the opportunity to properly qualifying whether the person can deliver what it actually needs. The candidate needs the commercial reality - not just the highlight reel.
Skip that shift, and here's what happens: someone accepts a role believing they're developing existing accounts. Three months later, they discover management expected them to build an entirely new customer base from nothing. The business thinks they're underperforming. They feel the job they accepted isn't the job they're doing.
Neither side set out to mislead the other. The role just was never explored in enough detail before the offer was made.
Revenue Managed Isn't Revenue Generated
A candidate might currently manage a £2m portfolio. On its own, that number tells you surprisingly little.
Did they personally win those customers, or inherit them? Does their employer's brand generate the enquiries? Does an internal team prepare their quotes? Are they growing new business, or protecting what's already there?
None of this diminishes what someone's achieved - it just describes different flavours of technical sales experience. A salesperson protecting £2m of legacy accounts might be excellent at retention and completely unproven entering a new territory with no customers, brand recognition or pipeline. Someone with a smaller headline number might have built their entire book from cold in a much harder market.
The question isn't just "how much do you sell?" It's "what did you personally do to produce that number?"
A proper interview should establish:
- Revenue and margin they personally manage vs. inherited
- Which customers they introduced
- How they generate new enquiries
- Average order value and typical sales cycle
- Their role in quoting, tendering and negotiating
- Support they receive from estimators, engineers and marketing
- Whether their employer's reputation is doing the selling for them
- Which elements of their success would actually transfer
This isn't about undermining what someone's achieved. It's about understanding the conditions that produced it and whether your business can offer anything similar.
Same Job Title, Completely Different Job
"Sales Engineer" can describe two very different roles. One handles prospecting, site surveys, technical solutions, quoting and negotiation start to finish. Another with the exact same title mostly manages existing accounts and routes technical questions to an applications team.
Before you start recruiting, get clear on what you actually need:
- Generate entirely new customers
- Revive dormant or underperforming accounts
- Manage and protect an established book
- Provide technical support to an existing sales team
- Handle inbound enquiries and quoting
- Open up a new product, territory or sector
- Build relationships with consultants and influence specifications
- Manage framework agreements or long-term project pipelines
These overlap in practice. But naming the primary objective is what lets you assess candidates against the job they'll actually do - not the title on their CV. It also stops you hiring a strong account manager when you actually need a hunter, or appointing a natural business developer into a role that's mostly technical quoting.
What to Put on the Table Before They Sign
Once there's genuine mutual interest, give them the real picture.
Revenue and margin. Annual target, gross margin expectations, how it's measured, how much growth must come from new business, what triggers commission, and what "good" looks like at 3, 6 and 12 months. A £1m target means something completely different depending on whether they're inheriting warm accounts, or opening a new market with a 12-month approval cycle.
Existing pipeline. Which accounts they'll inherit, what's genuinely in the pipeline - and its real stage and quality - whether dormant accounts count, and how territory is split. A spreadsheet of prospective company names is not a pipeline. If they're starting from zero qualified opportunities, they should know that going in.
New business expectations. How much cold prospecting is truly expected, who owns lead generation, visit frequency, travel demands, and whether the role touches tendering or spec influence. Someone can be excellent at growing existing relationships and genuinely unsuited to a role that's 80% cold outreach - neither skill is better, but the mismatch will surface eventually.
Support they'll actually get. Product training, whether estimators handle quoting, technical/engineering backup, pricing authority, current lead times, and CRM/forecasting expectations. A candidate's current numbers might be propped up by infrastructure that doesn't exist in your business - worth knowing before an offer, not after.
Match Expectations to the Actual Sales Cycle
Not every technical salesperson can fairly be measured on the same timetable.
Someone selling frequently-ordered components to an established base can reasonably be expected to generate revenue fast. Someone selling bespoke machinery, automation or infrastructure may spend months developing a single opportunity before an order lands.
Before setting targets, get clear on:
- How long it typically takes a new hire to become technically competent
- The average time from identifying an opportunity to receiving an order
- Whether customers require site surveys, trials or technical approvals
- How many people influence the purchasing decision
- Whether projects are competitively tendered
- When the business actually recognises an order as revenue
- What a realistic pipeline needs to contain to hit the annual target
If the average sales cycle is nine months, judging someone at the three-month mark purely on revenue tells you almost nothing. Early performance is better judged on the quality of opportunities they've identified, their access to the right decision-makers, and whether those opportunities are genuinely progressing.
That said, a long sales cycle shouldn't become an excuse for an empty pipeline. The point of agreeing measures upfront is to tell the difference between someone building real long-term opportunities, and someone whose lack of progress is being quietly covered by "these things take time."
Build a 90-Day Roadmap Together:
Days 1-30
Product training, internal introductions, existing-customer meetings, territory planning
Days 31-60
Target-account activity, customer visits, enquiries, site surveys, first quotes
Days 61 - 90
Qualified opportunities, pipeline building, account plans, early conversions
6-12 Months
Revenue, margin, new customers, account growth, forecast accuracy
Keep these as genuine indicators of progress, not arbitrary activity quotas - ten well-qualified meetings with the right customers beat fifty logged just to satisfy a KPI.
This also gives the candidate room to push back on unrealistic timelines before they accept. If they know from experience that customers need six months of testing before ordering, that conversation belongs before the three-month review, not during it.
Honest Qualification Doesn't Weaken the Opportunity
Some businesses worry that being upfront about targets, cold prospecting, or a thin pipeline will put strong candidates off.
Sometimes it will. That's not necessarily a bad outcome.
If someone loses interest once they understand the role in full, they were never going to stay excited discovering it the hard way in month one. A real conversation doesn't make a strong opportunity weaker, it filters for the person who's genuinely right for it, and gives you an honest read on whether their track record actually transfers.
A successful appointment isn't someone who accepted an offer. It's someone who understood exactly what they were joining, knew what success required, and stayed motivated to deliver it.
Want the full framework?
EMT Talent's Technical Sales Interview Checklist covers the commercial, technical and practical ground worth working through before you make an offer - built for hiring Sales Engineers, Technical Sales Managers, BDMs, Account Managers, Applications Engineers and other commercially-minded engineering talent.
If you are recruiting within technical sales and would like a copy, contact EMT Talent and we will send it across.
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