Sales & Account Management
Resilience is the requirement nobody puts in the posting.Hire sales talent who keep going.
Entry-level sales has the highest failure rate of any role we place, and almost none of it is about intelligence. People leave because they were not honestly prepared for how much of the job is hearing no, or because they were hired for confidence in an interview rather than persistence over a quarter.
We are direct with candidates about what the work involves before they ever reach your pipeline. It costs us some applicants. It costs you fewer hires who quit in month three.
Titles we place
The roles this covers
Titles vary by company. If yours is not listed but the work rhymes with these, it is still worth a conversation.
- Sales Development Representative
- Business Development Associate
- Inside Sales Representative
- Account Coordinator
- Account Manager
- Client Success Associate
What we screen for
What good looks like in this function
Every candidate is interviewed by a person before you see them. These are the things we are actually listening for.
They have been told no and kept going
Athletics, fundraising, canvassing, commission retail. The domain matters far less than whether someone has a real reference point for rejection and can describe how they handled it.
They are curious about the customer
The candidates who last ask what the buyer is actually trying to solve. The ones who do not treat the script as the job and plateau quickly.
They take coaching without defending
Sales is the function with the tightest feedback loop. Someone who argues with their first call review will be difficult to develop, however well they present.
They track their own numbers
Before anyone asks them to. It is a small signal and a reliable one.
Why early-career works here
Experienced sales hires arrive with a method that worked somewhere else, and unlearning it is often harder than teaching from scratch. Early-career reps learn your motion, your product and your qualification criteria as the default. For teams with real onboarding, that is a meaningful advantage.
Other roles we hire for
Hiring for more than one function?
Katapult places across four priority categories. The screening is the same; what we listen for changes.