Two things about hiring salespeople in Brazil regularly catch foreign employers out: how commission interacts with employment law, and how much of B2B selling here runs through personal relationships that belong to the individual rather than the company.
Commission is part of remuneration, legally
Sales staff are typically employed under CLT, and commissions paid with habituality are generally treated as part of remuneration. That means they feed the calculation base for vacation pay, the thirteenth salary and severance deposits.
Two consequences follow. Employer cost of a variable-heavy plan runs above the headline percentage, and restructuring commission later is legally and culturally harder than in markets where variable pay sits outside base compensation. Design it with Brazilian counsel before the first hire, not after the tenth.
Relationships are an asset — and they belong to the person
In many sectors here, access to a buyer runs through a relationship built over years. A candidate's network is therefore a genuine asset rather than a line on a CV, and worth probing specifically: which relationships are theirs, which belonged to the employer, and what realistically transfers.
It also cuts the other way. Someone hired mainly for their book can take it with them, so a sales organisation built entirely on individual relationships is fragile. That is an argument for process and account coverage, not against hiring well-connected people.
Assessing numbers you cannot verify
Every candidate hit target in some year, and almost none of it is checkable. The answer is not to demand proof but to ask for context, which is hard to invent coherently: what was the target, how many of the team hit it, and how did it change the following year?
How much of your result came from accounts you opened? distinguishes a genuine hunter from someone who inherited a strong book — and honest answers tend to come with smaller, more credible numbers.
Describe the largest deal you lost, and when it was actually lost. Strong salespeople identify the precise moment, usually early, and usually before they recognised it at the time.
Follow-up continues for 90 days. Revenue cycles rarely close in that window, so the useful signals are activity and pipeline quality: someone building a funnel by month three usually delivers by month six, and someone who has not started does not.
