Why Hiring Salespeople for ESG Data & AI Companies Is So Hard
By Farrell Associates — B Corp-certified sustainability & ESG recruitment specialists*
Every salesperson sounds good. That's the problem.
If you run an ESG data, stewardship-tech or climate-analytics business and you've hired a salesperson who didn't work out, you are in good company. It is the single most common failed hire we see, and it is so hard to get right because good and average people sound almost identical.
Salespeople are the one category of candidate who are professionally good at the exact thing an interview tests. They read the room, they mirror you, they answer the question you meant rather than the one you asked, and they leave you feeling that the meeting went well. Which is their job and something they will have learnt to do even if they haven’t been bringing in the numbers. So, the interview, which for every other role is at least a rough filter, tells you very little here. The average salesperson and the exceptional one sound the same for forty-five minutes. The difference only becomes apparent when you are a few months in.
Two jobs that share a title
The mistake underneath most of these hires is treating "salesperson" as one job. It is two, and they need different people.
A relationship manager, sometimes called an account manager or client director, inherits a book of business and grows it. The work is renewals, upsell, cross-sell, keeping the client happy, being the trusted voice when the contract comes up. It rewards patience, empathy and consistency. Good relationship managers are worth a great deal, and in a mature business with a large installed base they are the engine of revenue.
A hunter builds the book from nothing. The work is finding the people who should be buying but aren't, getting in front of them without an introduction, holding a consultative conversation with a sceptical stewardship head or an LGPS pool's investment committee, shaping a solution, pricing it, and closing. It rewards resilience, self-direction and an almost unreasonable tolerance for being ignored. The pipeline is empty on Monday morning then it is the hunter's fault.
Most ESG data and AI companies at the point of hiring are small, growing and under-known. Nothing comes through the door. They need hunters. And they overwhelmingly hire relationship managers, because relationship managers are lovely to interview and there are far more of them.
They are also probably open to a move in search of an easy to sell product, or a great account. The real hunters will make it work anywhere.
High EQ is necessary and not sufficient
We see the same pattern in almost every search for this profile. The candidates who come through from the big data vendors, the index providers and the ratings agencies have superb emotional intelligence. They have spent years managing large, demanding institutional accounts and they can handle any room.
What those candidates often lack is determination, in the specific sense of the willingness to keep going when nobody is answering. At a large vendor the brand does the prospecting and opens the doors. Eighty per cent expansion, twenty per cent new logo, presented as hunting. The candidate is not being dishonest; they have never had to find out whether they can do the other thing, because they have never had to.
Put that person into a thirty-person company with a good product and no brand, and the EQ is still there but the pipeline isn't. It is not a failure of talent. It is a mismatch of job.
How to tell the difference before you hire
You cannot tell from the CV, and you cannot tell from the first interview. But you can tell, if you ask the right things and refuse to be charmed out of the answers.
Ask for the number. A real hunter can quote their attainment to the decimal for each of the last three years, tell you what proportion was net-new logo, and name the deals. A relationship manager will give you a team number, a territory number, or a story about a difficult year. Push for the split between expansion and new business. If they can't or won't separate it, assume it was mostly expansion.
Ask how the last three deals started. The tell is the first contact. "I was introduced by our head of partnerships" and "they came inbound from the conference" are honourable answers and they are relationship-manager answers. "I'd been emailing her for four months and she finally replied" is the answer you're looking for.
Ask about the deal they lost and listen for the excuse. Every salesperson loses deals. The relationship manager tends to explain the loss in terms of the product, the pricing or the competitor's platform. The hunter tends to explain it in terms of what they would do differently. "If we'd had a better platform I'd have won" is one of the most reliable red flags in this whole process, because it means the person's head falls off under rejection and the company is about to become the reason.
Ask what they do when the pipeline is empty. The best answer we ever heard to this was from someone who said they would reflect on everything they had done and figure out what they needed to tweak to get better.
Why this matters more in ESG and sustainable finance
Overarching EQ and determination is intelligence, integrity, and credibility.
You need the determination of a hunter, the EQ of a relationship manager, and enough fluency in the buyer's world to be credible so that they will want to work with you and the integrity ensures that the focus ins on long term partnerships rather than transactional sales.
Determination is the one that can't be taught and the one that interviews worst. Product content can be learned in six months by the right person. EQ you can see. Which means the whole search comes down to finding evidence of the quality that's hardest to see and refusing to be reassured by the two that are easy.
What to do about it
Decide before you start which of the two jobs you are hiring for, and write the brief for that job, not for a hybrid that doesn't exist. If you need both, hire two people and let them compete or complement; several of our clients have done this deliberately and it de-risks a single point of failure.
Then interview for determination as if it were a technical skill, because for this role it is one. Get the numbers. Trace the origin of the deals. Listen to how they talk about losing. And put them in front of your hardest buyer before you make the offer, not after.
The salesperson who sounds best in the room is not necessarily the one who will fill it. In this market, they usually aren't.
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FAQ
What is the difference between a hunter and a relationship manager in sales?
A hunter generates new business from accounts that have never bought: prospecting, first meetings, consultative selling and closing. A relationship manager grows revenue from existing clients through renewals, upsell and service. They need different temperaments, and the titles on a CV rarely tell you which one you are looking at.
Why do ESG data and AI companies struggle to hire salespeople?**
Because their buyers are expert and sceptical, their brands are small, and the candidate pool from large data vendors is dominated by people whose "new business" experience was mostly account expansion supported by a big brand. High emotional intelligence is common; the determination to build pipeline without inbound support is rare.
How do you test whether a sales candidate is a hunter?
Ask for personal quota attainment split between new logo and expansion, trace how their last three deals originated, listen to how they explain a lost deal, ask what they do when the pipeline is empty, and put them in front of your most difficult buyer before the offer.
Should a small ESG data company hire one senior salesperson or two?
If the profile you need doesn't exist in one person, hiring two who complement each other, one with proven closing pedigree and one with deep buyer credibility, reduces the risk of a single failed hire setting the business back a year.