Building a seven-person enterprise sales team across DACH and the Nordics, when six of the last ten hires had failed to ramp

At a glance

The brief

The client had built a strong position in the UK and Ireland selling a mid-market motion: eight week sales cycles, average contract value around £24,000, one economic buyer. The board had funded a move up-market and into continental Europe simultaneously. That meant selling six figure contracts into enterprise revenue organisations, with procurement, security review, and a buying committee of seven or more.

They needed a VP Sales for EMEA, four enterprise account executives split between DACH and the Nordics, and two SDR team leads to build outbound in-region.

Why it had stalled

The failure pattern was consistent and it was not a sourcing problem. It was a definition problem.

The client had been hiring for the logo on the CV. Candidates arrived from well-known SaaS names with strong numbers attached, and then failed. When we analysed the last ten commercial hires against their performance, the correlation was obvious. Every successful hire had personally run a sales cycle longer than four months into a committee. Every failed hire had come from a high-velocity, high-volume motion where the deal closed on a demo and a discount.

Those are different jobs. A rep who is genuinely excellent at 40 deals a year at £20,000 is not automatically capable of six deals a year at £180,000, and the transition failure is not a character flaw. Nobody had ever written it down as a hiring criterion.

The second issue was verification. Attainment figures on a CV are self-reported and, in our experience, optimistic. The client had no mechanism for testing them.

What we did differently

We rebuilt the scorecard before we ran the search.

We spent a day with the CRO, the top-performing UK enterprise AE and the head of revenue operations, and defined the profile on evidence rather than reputation. The criteria we agreed were specific: minimum four month average sales cycle, average contract value above £90,000, demonstrable multi-threading across at least five stakeholders, and prior experience selling into a revenue or finance persona rather than into IT.

We also defined what we would deliberately ignore, which mattered just as much. Brand name of previous employer was removed as a screening criterion entirely. It had been the single strongest predictor of a bad hire.

We approached the people who were performing, not the people who were available.

The available enterprise AE in DACH in a given quarter is usually available for a reason. We mapped 23 vendors selling adjacent categories into the same buyer, built a named list of 180 quota-carrying reps across DACH and the Nordics, and prioritised those we could evidence were at or above 100% attainment and therefore had no reason whatsoever to take our call.

Every one of the four AEs hired came from a direct or adjacent competitor. Two came from the same vendor, one of whom introduced the other after accepting. That happens when the first hire genuinely believes in the move rather than escaping something.

We verified attainment through the back channel.

For every candidate reaching final stage, we ran informal reference conversations with former managers and, where possible, former colleagues in our network, specifically to test the numbers. Three candidates who looked outstanding on paper were removed at this stage. One had reported team attainment as personal attainment. One had a single deal representing 71% of their annual number, inherited from a departing colleague.

The client never saw those three. That is the part of the work that does not show up in a placement fee but decides whether the hire works.

We ran it alongside their internal talent team, not in competition with it.

The client's internal recruiter had been managing the interview process and taking the blame for hires she had never been allowed to define. We gave her the scorecard, the market map and the competitor list, and she ran the process end to end. We fed the pipeline. She owned the candidate experience and the offer stage.

She has since hired two further AEs directly using the same map. We would rather have that relationship for the next five years than protect a fee on two roles.

The one that nearly got away

The VP Sales EMEA search ran five months and we lost the first two finalists.

The first withdrew at offer stage for a competing role with a larger equity package. The second was rejected by the CRO late in the process, correctly, on the grounds that he had built a team in the Nordics but never in DACH and was underselling how different those markets are.

At that point most search processes get quietly re-scoped, which usually means the client hires someone they have already decided is not quite right. We refused the re-scope and went back to mapping instead, extending into two adjacent categories we had originally excluded.

The eventual hire was a regional director at a larger competitor who had been passed over for a VP role during an internal restructure four weeks before we called. He had built enterprise teams in Munich and Stockholm, had personally closed above £250,000 average contract value, and was not on the market in any sense that a job advert would have reached.

He accepted in week 21. Two of the four AEs subsequently hired were people he had worked with before, sourced from our map and closed with his direct involvement.

The results

• 7 of 7 roles filled in 22 weeks
• 4 of 4 account executives hired directly from named competitors
• 6 of 7 hires at or above 100% quota attainment in year one, against a prior baseline of 40%
• First closed DACH enterprise contract within 4 months of the VP's start date
• EMEA pipeline coverage moved from 1.8x to 3.4x within two quarters
• Internal talent team has since delivered two further AE hires without agency support

In the client's words

"The uncomfortable part of the process was being told that our previous hiring criteria were the reason our previous hires failed. They were right. Once we fixed the definition, the hiring got a lot easier."

Chief Revenue Officer, B2B SaaS vendor