Since we work in the sale hiring and management arena, we get the chance to see a sales position from both sides – the sales management side and the sales person side. It is a unique perspective that we discuss often internally.
Like most people, we tend to look at what goes wrong in these situations and we really see 2 items that lead to performance issues within the department:
Mismanaged – Sales Manager side
This problem is quite severe and certainly is the greater of the two problems. A sales manager who mismanages salespeople has a tremendously negative effect on an entire company. The most common problem is disengagement. A sales manager who does not invest time in his or her people is worth little. I think this is the driving force behind sales managers who want to hire salespeople from their industry. The hope is that they won’t have to train the new salesperson. They can plug them into a territory, walk away and watch the revenue roll in.
The polar opposite of this problem is micromanagement. In most sales manager cases that we see, the manager morphs into the surrogate closer. They swoop in to close as many accounts as possible at the end of the sales cycle. Over time, the salesperson develops a crutch where they must rely on the manager to close. I believe salespeople gravitate to this position for a simple reason – if the prospect doesn’t close, the blame is shared by the manager and the salesperson. You could call it performance insulation.
Misemployed – Sales Person side
This term gets bandied about but I think it is accurate. Most salespeople have a decent set of sales skills (though we have found our share of ciphers). The misemployed issue develops when their skill set is not a match to the position’s needs. I know this sounds a bit overly simplistic, but you would be surprised by how many hiring managers are grossly unaware of what skills are needed to succeed in the role.
In these instances, experience becomes the hiring hallucinogen. The fact that a salesperson has experience in your industry does not mean they have the skill set to succeed at your company. I suspect a part of this hiring approach feeds back into the previous section in reference to the desire of the sales manager to hire someone and have them start producing with minimal, if any, training.
The outcome of a misemployed salesperson is someone who seems to be close to “clicking” but they never reach it. The salesperson’s performance resides in what Teddy Roosevelt described as “that grey twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.” They perform well enough to stay on the team for a time, but they are not strong in their role. The ultimate issue in this case is creeping mediocrity. Once mediocrity overtakes your sales team, the fix becomes far more difficult.
Both of these performance problems can be avoided by evaluating your current team (including the sales manager) and ensuring that your hiring process is repeatably accurate. Most stereotypical sales hiring processes are good strategically but poor tactically. When this happens, sales manager utter phrases like “I know what I want, I just cant’ find the right person.” Don’t let this happen to your sales department. Stay in front of the performance problems and keep your sales department growing.