Top sales talent: it’s a sellers’ market

16th July 2026 |   Bob Apollo

Why hiring great salespeople is a negotiation between two parties who both need to do their homework – it’s definitely not a one-way selection process.

Anyone involved in sales recruitment for high-impact roles complains about the same thing: there just aren’t enough outstanding salespeople to go round. It’s not a new problem. Indeed, the underlying scarcity of genuinely top-performing salespeople has been a structural feature of B2B sales for decades. But the problem is getting worse – as are the consequences. What’s different now is that the effects are harder to hide. In a more competitive, fasterchanging environment, the cost of a mediocre sales hire shows up sooner and more painfully than it once did – and so does the cost of losing a top performer.