From Dick Costolo’s Ask the Wizard blog:
Briefly, the “No False Positives” school of hiring says that bad hires are worse than no hire because bad employees infect the company with all sorts of issues. Better to march on with nobody filling an important slot than to bring in a sub-par performer.
The hire fast, fire fast approach basically can be boiled down to “it’s really almost impossible to understand whether a person is going to be a killer A+ match before they start working with you day to day, so best to find somebody that seems close enough, and then remove them quickly if they don’t work out.”
This topic resonates with us and becomes amplified when you read further into the post:
You can hire fast, fire fast with sales people. It’s very very hard to comprehend a priori who will be able to best sell your service/product in a particular region to a particular customer base. Since this is an area of the company where people generally are responsible for very straightforward, measurable and explicit individual goals (ie, sales targets), it’s much easier to communicate and implement a hire fast, fire fast kind of policy with this group. You have to ensure you really stick to it however, and understand when company processes and products are causing the sales ramp challenge(s).
That’s my emphasis above and I have to disagree, in part, with his conclusion. First off, yes, you can have a priori knowledge of a salesperson’s ability to sell your service/product – that is what we do for a living. We work with a wide range of companies in a wide range of markets, but we see distinct patterns in hiring salespeople.
Here are 3 of the most common pitfalls we encounter:
Entrepreneurs
The sales manager would prefer to have a team of entrepreneurs. Successful sales does require some independence, but often sales managers abdicate their responsibility to coach, train, debrief, motivate and hold their salespeople accountable. In effect, they hire a strong salesperson, provide minimal training and then expect them to perform with no management. This is the most significant pitfall we see in sales departments and one that is exasperated by a hire fast, fire fast mentality.
Savior
The sales manager knows the revenue stream is drying up fast so the solution is to hire a savior to double revenue in half the time. In this instance, every facet of a new hire is turbo-charged. The revenue quota, if attained, should lead to the salesperson owning the company since it hasn’t been attained in years (if ever). A typical approach here is to attempt to hire a salesperson from a competitor who will bring their own book of business. This approach rarely works and is the forerunner to a churn-and-burn sales department.
Clones
The sales manager would prefer to have a salesforce comprised of clones. Typically, they would like to clone themselves. Any salesperson who varies in style, motivations or rewards is viewed marginal. The subtle truth here is that a sales department comprised of clones contains salespeople with the same strengths and the same weaknesses. One market change can render this team impotent.
The Wizard makes an important point at the end of his post – you have to understand what obstacles are affecting the sales ramp process. The first place I would look – the sales manager. Is he or she falling into any of the pitfalls above? What went wrong in the hiring process? What led he or she to believe this salesperson was the best candidate at the time and what changed (or was discovered after hiring)?
We do see companies hanging on to mediocre or worse salespeople when they should be upgrading the team. The belief that a warm body is better than no body rules the day in these organizations. But there has to be a happy medium – somewhere in between hire fast, fire fast and no false positive approach.