A unicorn seller is one company’s perfect sales fit – a candidate that already aligns with how you sell, who you sell to and more. They can hit the ground running without needing any additional training or coaching, helping you land bigger and more complex deals, and scale your revenue generation up to hit your next stage. All of this makes them a rare find, and very hard to source and hire quickly.
Betts Recruiting has put together this blog to explain more about what makes a unicorn seller, how to find them and how we can help you source your perfect fit without breaking your hiring budget:
Defining Your Unicorn Seller
What defines a unicorn sales representative ultimately comes down to what defines your organization. While many will inherently need to be stellar salespeople, it is about more than their ability to sell – it hinges on how much they know about selling in your particular space. Your right fit will align with your existing sales motion specifically, with an experienced understanding of what success looks like for your target accounts and how to get there by the time they are hired.
The Death of One-Size-Fits-All Hiring
To truly understand what makes a unicorn sales rep, we need to establish how we all got here. For over a decade, SaaS companies have relied on the same recycled job descriptions for go-to-market (GTM) roles, all with the same rehashed criteria. This plug-and-play template created a standardized approach to recruitment that prioritized sourcing for the same collection of traits, even while the needs of most orgs evolved as the market transformed in a post-Covid world.
This traditional approach fails because it casts too wide a net, guaranteeing that you will be fishing the same oversaturated pond as your competitors while your true unicorn candidate remains hidden to your hiring managers. Generic requirements like “3-5 years of sales experience” or “background in technology sales” do not differentiate the candidates who can truly drive results from those who simply check basic boxes.
You need a sales rep who can walk in the door and immediately contribute without extensive training or ramp-up time. This leads to the biggest recruiting paradox – there remain more open positions requiring the right qualified professionals than there are candidates who meet these demands. Even fewer possess the highly specific demands of your unique seller.
Key Pillars of a Unicorn Seller
Even though each must be a unique fit for your needs, there are always a few key shared, broad characteristics between unicorn sellers:
Sales Motion Alignment
Your unicorn seller must demonstrate they can both hit revenue targets and immediately integrate into the methodologies your current team employs. They should be able to handle – and surpass – your target deal size, hit your ideal quota and work within your average sales cycle length. Most importantly, they need firsthand experience with the specific go-to-market strategies you deploy.
Audience Experience
Your unicorn candidate will know your market inside and outside, understand the needs and demands of the top personas within it, and what information they want to hear without noise or obfuscation. They will have worked with your product type before, as well as the industry markets and titles you are looking to sell to. Their past experience must also include working in an organization like yours already; if you are a VC-backed startup, they should understand the idiosyncrasies and challenges of your current stage and what you need to reach the next round of funding.
Technical Competency
SaaS deals today are increasingly driven by communication of technical features, establishing clear value for prospects and customers while differentiating yourself from your competitors’ platform(s). This means that sales reps need to be able to talk around actual functionality and product details, creating a need for unicorn sellers to be savvy in real tech talk over business language alone. Many companies – particularly in AI – are forgoing hiring for traditional GTM roles like Account Executives (AEs), and prioritizing hybrid positions like Sales Engineers (SEs) that can sell on technical conversations.
Sourcing a Unicorn Candidate
Once you have properly defined your unicorn seller, the real challenge begins – actually finding them. However, this is a difficult process due to these factors:
Talent Pool Scarcity
The talent pool for candidates with the tenure to qualify as your unicorn seller is fundamentally limited, and this scarcity varies dramatically by industry. In emerging sectors like AI and machine learning, finding technically-savvy and experienced sales reps with relevant experience presents a challenge. Even in more established SaaS markets, your competitors are targeting the same candidate pools, making talent acquisition more strenuous and competitive than ever before.
Compensation Visibility
Because there are only so many qualified unicorns actively seeking a new job, the supply and demand situation makes it hard to pin down a steady compensation rate for each role. This makes it much harder for you to attract top talent without being able to make a competitive offer, while staying constantly on top of how rates are changing currently. Betts has established a general rule of thumb that each tech company should expect to pay at least 10% above average salaries to lock down their unicorn seller fast.
Interview Requirements
Traditional interview processes often fail to adequately identify a company’s true unicorn seller, as they are structured to probe for the specific qualifications that matter for each organization and market. Effective assessment requires targeted questions around:
- Sales Motion Methodology: Understanding whether candidates have experience with your exact approach, not just general sales success
- Deal Experience: Historical performance indicators that match your targets, including average deal size and typical cycle length
- Technical Knowledge: For SaaS companies, the ability to manage and customize product demonstrations with attention to detail
- Revenue Focus: Track record with both net new prospect acquisition and upsell/expansion revenue that drives ARR growth
How Betts Transforms Unicorn Seller Acquisition
Betts has developed a systematic approach that addresses each of these challenges through a combination of strategic methodology, technology solutions and market intelligence that job boards and traditional recruiting agencies simply cannot match:
Firsthand Expertise
Betts brings over a decade of experience working exclusively with technology companies, having partnered with over 10,000 startups and helped several scale to IPO. Our recruiters specialize in sourcing go-to-market roles and maintain deep knowledge of how sales motions vary across different tech sectors – from early-stage AI companies requiring highly technical sellers to established SaaS firms scaling enterprise sales teams. Through our work with thousands of successful placements, we have developed our own methodology for identifying what separates true unicorn sellers from candidates who merely look good on paper.
Market Intelligence
Betts provides real-time compensation data that enables you to get ahead of unicorn “bidding wars” effectively. With resources like our annual Compensation Guide and Comp Engine, we deliver deeper insights into key trends beyond the latest rates, including the available talent pool for top roles and Time-to-Hire predictions.
Technology-Enabled Recruitment
Our Betts Connect platform transforms how your hiring team identifies and engages with candidates, with KPI filters that enable you to drill down into your unicorn seller requirements, while reporting and analytics help track and optimize search parameters in real-time. The platform provides performance tracking for specific criteria, ensuring your search stays focused on the characteristics that actually drive results. Integration with Comp Engine also delivers real-time salary data for competitive positioning in bidding wars, industry-specific compensation trends and specialist versus generalist rate insights.
The Betts Network
The Betts network is one of the largest in tech for GTM roles, and includes professionals with specific industry experience across AI, SaaS and other sectors. Through Connect, we also grant you visibility into candidates that are either actively or passively seeking new employment, including those in Quiet Consideration mode.
Cost-Effective Hiring
Unlike traditional recruiting approaches, Betts’ Recruitment-as-a-Service (RaaS) model eliminates per-hire fees, enabling unlimited searches while maintaining budget control. Our Surge Recruiting options provide accelerated placement when timing is critical, and guaranteed interviews reduce time-to-hire risks that can cost companies their preferred candidates. The result is budget-friendly access to premium talent that would otherwise require significant internal resources to identify and engage.
Let Betts Accelerate Your Unicorn Seller Search
The competition for unicorn sellers will only intensify as more companies recognize that a generic recruitment approach cannot deliver the specialized talent they need to scale. While your competitors continue using outdated job descriptions and traditional recruiting methods, Betts Connect provides the targeted approach, real-time market intelligence and extensive network access required to identify and secure your perfect fit candidate.
Contact Betts today to sign up for a demo of Connect, and see how our market-leading platform will help you secure your right fit faster and more cost-effectively.