Why Salespeople Make Terrible Accountants (and Other Hiring Mistakes You’re Making)

Property management companies are run by salespeople, but not every role needs one. Here’s how to stop hiring the wrong people for the job.

Both among industry vendors and property managers themselves, I see an ongoing problem in the industry: companies who can’t seem to properly hire and manage any employee who isn’t a salesperson, or at least a salesperson-like personality type. There’s a simple explanation for this: most PM companies are owned and managed by former Realtors (salespeople by definition), and most PM industry vendors are owned and managed by entrepreneurial types who tend to identify with salespeople or were originally salespeople themselves.

The problem with this is that the vast majority of roles in any company aren’t salespeople roles and aren’t good fits for salesperson personality types.

What is a Salesperson Personality?

Some of you may be asking “what’s a salesperson personality anyway?” Great question, and this is why I’m a big fan of Culture Index, which is an employment-centric personality testing system. Many large PM companies are users of Culture Index, and I used it myself when I was in rapid growth and hiring mode. One of the things I love about Culture Index is that everyone who signs up for it is required to go through a couple of days of training. The training covers not only how to use the platform and understand the reports, but also what you should be looking for in different kinds of roles in your company.

All too often, a business owner thinks that they need a company filled with people like them. They view themselves as “go-getters” and “high performers” and they think they need people who are just like them to handle the other roles at their company. But the thing is, that salesperson type personality really only fits one role very well: that of a salesperson. In just about all other roles, that person is going to be a massive failure.

Let’s take a look at what a top performing sales profile would like under Culture Index:

Now, this almost certainly looks like gibberish to you if you’ve never used Culture Index, so let me explain. The chart reads left to right, with the further right a given characteristic is, the stronger that is for the person, and the further left the lower it is. The red vertical line is the mean for the population, and two numbers away from the mean is a full standard deviation. So the further one of the dots gets away from the red line, the more unusual that trait is for that person compared to the average person.

The “rainmaker” personality type in Culture Index is the traditional idea of a high performing salesperson who just can’t stop closing deals left and right. It’s a pretty rare personality type. The “A” dot represents essentially how driven someone is. The “B” dot represents how strong their social skills are, and typically indicates their level of extroversion. The “C” dot represents how comfortable that person is with repetitive work and routine. And finally, the “D” dot represents how much attention to detail the person has. The “L” is for logic or reason, and the “I” can be thought of somewhat as how creative someone tends to be. This is a gross oversimplification of two days of Culture Index training, but it will work for our purposes here.

So when we look at this Rainmaker personality profile, we see that this person who is a top performing salesperson has above average drive, well above average social skills, above average tolerance for repetitive work, but EXTREMELY low attention to detail. They’re also about average on how much they rely upon logic/reason, and they’re quite creative.

Now, I said that this is a pretty typical sales profile, but I think it’s important to point out that I would NOT hire this person to be a BDM at my property management company. The reason for that is that sales at a PM company is pretty regimented and requires a lot of attention to detail, and this person just doesn’t have that. This salesperson would be a much better fit for a company whose salespeople don’t spend most of their days in a CRM, and instead close sales out on the road shaking hands and kissing babies. But if I was hiring someone for a medical device sales role? Yep, hire this man! He’ll convince every doctor that they need to buy the latest and greatest overpriced medical gizmo that will bankrupt the average family when their insurance company denies their claim.

Why This Doesn’t Work in Other Roles

While this person will sell medical device widgets like gangbusters, I sure as hell wouldn’t want him to manage my accounting department. Why? Let’s take a look at what a good accounting profile looks like in Culture Index:

I would hire this person to manage my books in a heartbeat. The extremely low “A” (almost two standard deviations below the mean) indicates that this person has absolutely no desire to lead people or create anything new. They just want to get the job done. The low “B” indicates that they don’t give a damn about socializing at work and being the life of the party. They’re happy to sit there at their desk in their spreadsheets and Quickbooks and just crunch numbers. The extremely high “C” indicates that this person is a-okay with doing routine work and sticking to the normal policies and procedures all the time. Exactly what you want from someone in a role that involves GAAP. And if you don’t know what GAAP is, you’re the perfect example why you need to hire people who aren’t like you in these kinds of roles. Finally, the very high “D” indicates that this person is obsessively focused on details. They will tear through mountains of financial documents to find the one missing penny to make sure their books are perfect every single time.

This is who you need in this role. If you put the Rainmaker personality type in this accounting/bookkeeping role, not only will they destroy your books and send you to the poor house, they’ll probably quit within a few months because they’re bored out of their mind. Different roles require different personality types.

A Company of Salespeople is a High-Growth, High-Churn Mess

I know quite a few PM companies like this, and even more PM industry vendor companies like this. They close new deals left and right…and then half of those deals go right out the back door because the company is a mess and can’t do anything right other than close new business. The CEO of the business is likely a Rainmaker or Enterpriser personality themselves, so they look at all of this dynamic activity going on and cheer for it, but they are so inept at sitting down and reading over spreadsheets that they don’t realize that they’d be much better off with a lower close ratio and a lower churn rate. Would it be as exciting? No. The giant bell they’ve probably setup in the sales bullpen while they were fantasizing about being the next Jordan Belfort wouldn’t be ringing as often, and they’d likely go through dopamine withdrawal. But they’d certainly be a lot happier about the net growth of their company, and definitely about its much higher profitability.

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Salespeople are great at closing new doors. They’re bad at onboarding those doors. They’re worse at managing those doors. And they’re terrible at managing the business itself. When you read a book like Traction (and if you haven’t, read it now), you’ll notice that the author talks about the importance of having two lead roles in the business: a visionary and an integrator. That’s because a visionary is a salesperson personality type and an integrator is an operational personality type. A business can’t survive and thrive with only one or the other. That’s not to say that every business needs to be a partnership, but if you’re a solo business owner, you need to make sure you have someone else on your team in a leadership position who can fill the other role. It is a VERY rare individual who can handle both effectively.

People Tend to Hire People Like Them

The reason I’m such a big fan of Culture Index (and full disclosure, they are NOT an advertiser and paid me nothing for this endorsement) is their motto: “Analytics Over Instincts.” The company is built on the idea that every person on earth, no matter how good you think are at “reading people,” absolutely sucks at putting the right person in the right seat. Your instincts are garbage. It’s okay, so are mine. Everyone’s are. Nobel Prize winning psychologist Danny Kahneman wrote a book back in 2011 called “Thinking, Fast and Slow” on many topics related to human psychology, but one of my favorite parts of the book discusses this aspect of hiring. I love this book so much that I literally carry it around with me in my laptop bag, and I re-read it when the WiFi is out on a flight. Highly recommend for anyone who is interested in how the human mind works. But specifically talking about this subject, Kahneman discussed his career in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). He worked in the psychology department, and was tasked with determining where each Israeli citizen would serve during their time in the military (military service is compulsory in Israel). Kahneman related how the IDF actually used a psychology department to make these decisions, which was impressive, and he expected the results to be fantastic compared to other methods.

But here’s the thing: after he studied the final outcomes of those placement decisions from years of data within the IDF, what he found was that the decisions that were made by his own fellow psychologists were no better than a coin flip. Here is an entire department of people who specialize in human psychology and are applying their specialty to one very specific task of placing the right people in the right roles in the military, and they’re still no better at putting the right people in the right seats than a random number generator would be. That was a big wakeup call for him, and it should be one for you, too. Because I can promise you this: if Kahneman and his fellow psychologists can’t do better than the flip of a coin, you’re probably going to do a whole lot worse.

Part of this is that people are just terrible judges of personalities, part of it is that nobody is actually honest in an interview because the incentive structures aren’t in place to reward honesty, and part of it is that certain personality types are just better at interviewing than others. But I think the biggest part of it is that people like to hire people who remind them of themselves. When I was at the airlines, I commonly heard pilot recruiters say “I’m just interviewing to make sure I would like to spend four days in the cockpit with this person.” Really? Shouldn’t you be a little more concerned with how good their stick-and-rudder skills are, or how knowledgeable they are on high altitude aerodynamics? Shouldn’t that be a little more important than whether you want to spend a few days sharing some good jokes with this guy you’d like to hang out with?

And since most PM companies and most PM industry vendors tend to be owned by salespeople personalities, what this means it that they end up hiring…a bunch of people with salespeople personalities. Which, of course, doesn’t work very well.

What Does Work Well?

Let’s get back to Kahneman, as he’s the expert on these matters. After he figured out that the old system in the IDF was pretty incompetent at placement, he was tasked with creating an entirely new system. What Kahneman decided to do was to remove as much human subjectivity from the process as possible and to instead make it as close to a purely objective numbers-based process as he could. Here’s what he wrote in his most famous book about this:

If you are serious about hiring the best possible person for the job, this is what you should do. First, select a few traits that are prerequisites for success in (the) position. Don’t overdo it – six dimensions is a good number. The traits you choose should be as independent from each other as possible from each other, and you should feel that you can assess them reliably by asking a few factual questions.

Next, make a list of those questions for each trait and think about how you will score it, say on a 1 to 5 scale. You should have an idea of what you will call ‘very weak’ or ‘very strong’.

These preparations should take you half an hour or so – a small investment that can make a significant difference in the quality of the people you hire.

To avoid halo effects, you must collect the information on one trait at a time, scoring each before you move on to the next one. Do not skip around.

To evaluate each candidate, add up the six scores. Firmly resolve that you will hire the best candidate whose final score is the highest, even if there is another one whom you like better – try to resist the urge to change the rankings.

A vast amount of research offers a promise: you are much more likely to find the best candidate if you use this procedure than if you do what people normally do in such situations, which is to go into the interview unprepared and make choices by an overall intuitive judgment such as ‘I looked into his eyes and liked what I saw’.

It seems pretty simple. Almost too simple. But it works. After he won his Nobel Prize, Kahneman went back to visit his old IDF base and found that they were still using the system that he developed 47 years earlier. Why? Because it’s the best possible system, and it had reliably produced the best possible results for decades. No matter what your opinion of Israel and their policies may be, you have to admit that the IDF is formidable. No one wants to mess with the IDF.

That said, it’s important to note that this isn’t fool-proof. You are still involved in the process, and you are still human. Human bias ALWAYS infiltrates any system that humans create and operate. But while a traditional interview process is only about 50% effective at best, this process is going to be 65% effective or better, and Kahneman says that’s pretty damned good when you consider how much humans have to be involved in it.

Kahneman also advised that nowadays, when we have such great personality measurement tools (like Culture Index), we should add those into the mix and rely upon them far more. The interview process that he describes above should really only be a last line of defense. Start off with the personality testing first. Use that as a filter, and only the people who have the right personality type even get interviewed. THEN apply his interview model to those people. If you do, you’ll probably only need to interview two or three people, and you’ll likely find a perfect fit. This will take your 65% success rate up to 80% or so.

Get Out of Their Way

After you’ve used this system and hired the right people, it’s time for the next step: get the hell out of their way and let them do their jobs the way they know best. Because YOU don’t know best. If you are a Rainmaker personality type, you telling an accountant how to do their job is like asking a school lunch lady to do some theoretical astrophysics work. Your only role is to set the major goals for the company, then let your people do what they are experts in.

It’s important to note that this is even true of managing salespeople. Just because you are a fantastic salesperson doesn’t mean that you will be a great sales MANAGER. Many of you have probably heard of the Peter Principle, the idea that people are promoted to the level of their incompetence. In other words, someone is fantastic at closing deals, so they get promoted to be the Director of Sales. The only problem is, the person isn’t good at managing people. Managing people is a skillset that requires attention to detail and patience, two traits that salespeople are notably lacking. So when the great salesperson gets promoted because of how great they were at sales, they quickly find themselves getting fired because they were awful at being a manager. Now they’re back to doing what they’re actually good at: sales. Or, what happens more commonly, another company hires them to manage their sales department because of their past experience and their great ability to sell themselves in an interview, and then they just get fired again a year or two later. Lather, rinse, repeat. This is one reason that executives tend to jump around from one company to another constantly. They aren’t just chasing more money. They’re also escaping situations where they’re failing, because they were never qualified to do the job in the first place. But because they have the experience on their resume, and because they’re great at selling themselves, they can keep snagging these roles, and the companies that hire them keep suffering for it.

Instead, you need to hire people that have the skillset for the role based on their personality more than their experience or their interview skills. And then let them do their thing without your interference. There is nothing you can do to help. All you can do is cause more harm. That may hurt your ego, but it is the reality.

Conclusion

I would encourage you to take a step back and do an honest assessment of your current workforce and how you’re managing them. And more importantly, do an honest assessment of yourself. If you have the funds available, sign up for Culture Index, or if you don’t have the funds available, learn how to use DISC profiles, a poor man’s Culture Index substitute. Have everyone, yourself included, do a profile, then see if the people actually fit the roles. I would wager that you’ll find that the people who don’t fit the roles based on their personality test results are also going to be the same people who have been underperforming or just plain sucking at their jobs. And then you have some difficult decisions to make.

But above all, my main goal of this article is this: to get you to stop hiring salespeople for every role, and to stop treating every employee like a salesperson. Understand that this doesn’t work, and make the necessary changes in your organization to accommodate a vast variety of personality types. This means you need to get rid of your meetings and “team building events” that are specifically geared towards extroverts, or only have those events within your more extroverted departments. I’m sure this makes you salespeople out there really uncomfortable. The idea of just letting the accountant hang out in their office with their spreadsheets instead of joining you for a raucous 4pm happy hour with the sales team probably makes you think that they’re “not being a team player.” But no, they’re being a team player. Not everyone is a LeBron James. The Lakers need a statistical analyst and an accountant, too. Not everyone is out there dunking, and if you have an entire organization of slam-dunk contest winners, what you really have is a losing team.

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