A slower market does not mean slower sales hiring. The premium on a genuine hunter goes up.

What has changed in the last six months is where the emphasis sits. As the economy has cooled and buying decisions have become more cautious, companies have put much more weight on revenue generation. What we see on live searches is stronger demand for genuine hunters, people who can create new enterprise opportunities, rather than for salespeople who work inbound leads or grow accounts that already exist. That is a shift in what a sales hire is being bought for, not just a shift in volume.

The most common mistake in a brief is asking for a hunter and then screening for something else. Clients say they want someone who opens new enterprise accounts, and then prioritise product knowledge, an exact industry background and years spent with a particular vendor. Those are the easy things to check and they are not the hard things to find. The genuinely scarce profile is someone with a real track record of opening new enterprise accounts, building relationships at senior level and closing complex deals. Product knowledge can be taught in a quarter. A relationship map inside Thai banks and conglomerates cannot.

When a strong salesperson turns a role down, it is almost never about base salary. It is about whether the target is actually achievable. An attractive base means very little if the territory is weak, the product has no real traction in the market, the commission plan is unrealistic, or there is not enough presales and delivery support behind the person expected to sell. Strong candidates in this specialism interrogate all of that before they interrogate the salary, and they are right to.

The hardest profile to find is the true enterprise hunter with established relationships at C level, particularly someone who can sell complex technology into large Thai organisations. The pool narrows sharply once the role also needs strong English, regional exposure, and a record of winning net new logos rather than growing inherited accounts. Each of those on its own is common enough. The combination is not.

Where the people actually are. The strongest candidates come from enterprise software vendors, cloud and cybersecurity companies, system integrators, telecoms and the major technology consultancies. The ones worth approaching are usually those carrying established relationships across banks, large corporates, government and the major Thai conglomerates, rather than those with long experience of selling one particular product. A competitive offer reflects that: the overall earning opportunity matters more than the base, which means a credible target, meaningful commission upside, clear territory ownership, real presales support, and a product the salesperson believes they can take to market. Equity has become more important too, particularly for startups trying to compete for this profile.

What we tell hiring managers. Spend more of the interview on how the candidate actually generated their revenue. What proportion came from new logos, how they opened those accounts, who they sold to, and whether the relationships belonged to them personally or to the company on their business card. And the thing worth knowing before you start is that a slower market does not mean slower sales hiring. It often means the opposite. When organic growth gets harder, companies invest more heavily in the people who can take market share, and the premium on a genuine hunter with real enterprise relationships goes up rather than down.