There are many sales books that help develop selling skills and provide inspiration. Few, however, focus entirely on sales management and Mike Weinberg’s latest book, Sales Management. Simplified., does just that.

Packed with actionable advice and hard-earned sales wisdom, the book reminds its readers to go back to the basics of sales management and focus on what really matters – leadership. Ultimately, the book is a common sense prescription for building and managing high performance sales teams, with no silver bullets, short-cuts, or fads – it’s blunt and reinforces the idea that less is more.

Peak Sales Recruiting’s CEO and Co-founder Eliot Burdett caught up with Mike to discuss what effective sales leadership means, causes of sales team underperformance, sales compensation as a motivational tool, and, of course, sales recruiting.

Mike, what was your inspiration for writing Sales Management. Simplified.? 

I did not want to write this book, I felt compelled to write it. I was tired of being called into companies by senior executives to fix their “sales problems”, only to discover that it was a leadership problem. It was out of utter exasperation and frustration with senior executives, who don’t understand sales management or bury sales managers in all kinds of crap, that I felt like I had to write this book. I was compelled by the various messes sales managers and executives often found themselves in.

When I first got into consulting, I was young and naive and thought if I coached everyone to sell like me that I could transform sales performance and change companies, but, I was wrong. I learned the hard way that you do not transform sales organizations from the bottom by training and coaching enough sales people; you have to deal with leadership and culture. If you do not deal with these two things then you do not transform anything. As a result, I felt like I had to get my frustrations off my chest and write this book.

Eliot: I always joke that when I was younger I made every mistake in the book and then some. If most people who read your book are like me, it will take them back to their early years and cause laughter and probably some cringing. I love the stories you go through including the different influential people you’ve met and the experiences you’ve been in. I liked your saying “as goes the leader so goes the organization”, the level of a sales team rarely ever exceeds the level of the sales leader. It really is a powerful quote.

I was mentored by some really great people, and one of the favourite expressions I came across was: “If it’s broken at the top then it’s broken and the team will never do better than the leader.” As most sales leaders spend their time living in reactive mode, cleaning up messes, sitting in corporate meetings, and doing everything but high value activities, they ultimately model that same behavior for their sales people. People ignore the fact that sales managers or executives of small companies are key leverage points for growing sales. Too often, time and money is spent training salespeople but none is spent on upgrading the sales leader – no wonder why executives are routinely frustrated with the sales team.

“If it’s broken at the top then it’s broken and the team will never do better than the leader.”

The book is a model for how organizations can overachieve and drive continual sales performance. What would you say are the top causes of inferior sales performance and team under performance?

My first book has a chapter dedicated to the ‘not-so-sweet’ 16 reasons salespeople underperform: they can’t tell the story, they live in reactive mode, they babysit their existing customers, they don’t run good sales calls and, they don’t know the customer’s calendars.

Due to the popularity of that chapter, I decided to dedicate the entirety of Part One of Sales Management. Simplified. to laying out the leadership reasons that sales teams underperform. That’s why Part One is so brutal; it’s very transparent about the challenges sales leaders are facing today.

It’s packed with stories about real executives, managers, and companies who have been struggling to drive revenue. Now, there are a ton of reasons as to why sales teams underperform, but, if I had to give you a couple, I’ll start with the big ones: 1) The one size fits all approach to sales talent management and sales compensation. 2) The reality that sales managers across verticals are being distracted and diverted from their primary job because the company buries them with the wrong activities and does not truly understand what the sales leader should be doing.

Sales compensation is a huge issue, and as you can imagine it plays a large role in enticing people to make a career change. In spite of some of the popular research that would argue otherwise, our experience tells us that great sales people rank it right up at the top of their list when deciding whether or not to listen to a new opportunity. So let’s start there – what are the top issues with sales comp plans today? 

I think there are a couple of big issues. Generally, these issues arise because the compensation plan does not drive the desired behaviors and results that executives want them to. It boils down to the two big compensation plans sins: 1) The plan is too flat, meaning there is very little difference from what top and bottom producers earn. 2) Compensation plans are not structured correctly to motivate reps to perform the right activities and behaviors that drive sales results.

Let’s start with the first issue – comp plans being too flat. Unfortunately, plans like these accomplish the exact opposite of what compensation plans should. Executives and senior sales leaders should be overcompensating their best people – this is assuming that their behavior drives results and not just care-taking a territory that was going to produce whether they got up in the morning or not. And since there is such a shortage of “A” players, the last thing sales leaders want to do is have one of their top producers question whether they are appreciated; so the goal should always be to overpay top people for what they produce, and create a discomfort for those who are underperforming because they should be hungry, uncomfortable, and embarrassed. The goal shouldn’t be for underperforming salespeople to live on what they’re taking home if they are not producing – the compensation plan should be structured to force a change in behavior to drive better results, or force the rep to quit and go fail somewhere else.

So when there is not a big enough earning delta between the top and bottom, you cause the best people to think about leaving which is the last thing sales leaders want.

“the goal should always be to overpay top people for what they produce, and create a discomfort for those who are underperforming”

Eliot: Do you think that some of these compensation plans are an intentional effort to create equity across the sales team?

That’s a brilliant question but I really don’t know. I think that there are some politically correct, egalitarian people designing comp plans that prefer when everything is the same because they don’t understand sales. The unfortunate reality is that not enough thinking goes into how the plan is designed, and how powerful it can be.

I see a lot of plans that don’t move ‘the needle’. Plans should incent the rep to behave a certain way and a lot of plans fail to do that. For example, let’s look at commission. Commission is only commission when it is earned and, unfortunately, a lot of times commission is in name only.

A few years back I had a client where a big part of their revenue was a consumable product. New reps would only have to do the hard work to find a large buyer of the consumable, then for years and years rely entirely on the revenue derived from this customer to hit their sales number. The truth is that if the customer was having a great year and production levels were good, whether that salesperson did anything or not, he or she was going to earn a fat commission check since that company kept buying the consumables. A compensation plan like this creates a big disincentive to sell; it gives the sales rep no reason to move ‘the needle’ if they can get away with doing nothing but babysit customers.

The second point that needs to be made about effective sales compensation is that a dollar is not a dollar when it comes to commission. I have no idea why so many companies pay the same commission rate for a sale to a customer that was acquired years ago – which only requires salespeople to babysit that account – and the same rate to the salesperson who puts in the hard work to acquire a new customer. The logical question sales leaders need to ask themselves when structuring their commission plans is: Why would my rep go the distance to do the hard work of hunting, when they can babysit and get fat, dumb, and rich off their client base?

I’m not saying to not serve existing customers, but why would anyone want to do the hard work when it does not pay any more money? The challenge for sales leaders is to think of this problem at the simplest level: What would happen if they overpaid for new business and, over time, reduced the commission to provide incentive for reps to hunt so they could not reap the rewards off the new customer and be forced to go out and find new business?

Eliot: I couldn’t agree more. At Peak, we see a surprisingly high number of comp plans that are overly simplistic and appear to have been an afterthought in terms of their ability to drive sales results. Surprisingly, there are often eureka moments when we walk through comp plans with our customers and they realize that their comp plans don’t necessarily incent the desired results.

I tell this story in the book. I was getting ready to talk to a group of about 15 business owners that met once a month. I was putting a PowerPoint slide together about compensation and complacency and I typed in compensation and complacency into the slide and it hit me like a ton of bricks: they start with the same 4 letters! Nobody ever talks about that but if you have complacent sales people you should start to look at your compensation plan. This is as blatant of a tie-in as it gets, and yet so many executives don’t want to go there – they don’t want the hassle or HR risks.

Let’s talk about the one size fits all approach to sales recruiting and hiring:

We were all made differently; we all have different DNA – some of us are wired to kill, care, be detail oriented, problem solve, and/or manage. It is rare to find all those gifts and talents in one person, and yet at so many companies have oversimplified the sales role where one person does everything. My argument is that this approach creates a very miserable average.

The best story I can give you is from my own career. I was the #1 person selling 3-4 more times than what other salespeople were because my manager looked at me and said, “you’re a good hunter but you’re pretty awful at this whole project management thing. You’re one of the few guys that knows how to go out and actively acquire a new customer, so we’re going to put an incredible team of support people around you. These people will strictly manage the ongoing customer relationships so that you can spend 80% of your time hunting – not 20%.”

So, if sales leaders were to take a rep who’s wired like a hunter and quadruple the amount of time they could spend prospecting, making friends, getting on airplanes, doing inside or outbound sales, what do you think would happen to results? What would happen if the sales leader took the very few good hunters they had and freed them up to do what they’re best at?

Now everyone likes to talk about hunters and farmers, but I talk about hunters and zookeepers. You have people who are wired like zookeepers – they love to nurse the baby animal, pet them, feed them, clean the cage, and spend time nurturing the animals. What if you tell that person that they spend too much time with animals? What if you were to go on and ask them to go pick up a rock and go kill an animal out in the field? People with these instincts do not succeed at these tasks for a simple reason – they hate it. They are not wired like that. They hate the conflict, they hate the risk, and they don’t want to pick up a weapon and kill. They are nurturing, caring, supportive, and do an awesome job when you give them the opportunity to care for the animal.

So imagine if executives actually took the time to properly evaluate their sales team’s DNA and assigned people to tasks that they were gifted at. When that happens, everyone wins – the sales person wins and the company wins since they operate in their area strengths.

What would happen if the sales leader took the very few good hunters they had and freed them up to do what they’re best at?

Eliot: The majority of the projects that we would take on are for hunter roles. Companies come to us because it is very difficult to find individuals that possess that specific skill set AND have an incredible track record in selling. We are very familiar with the DNA of that person and how different it is from a farmer, or as you call it, a zookeeper. You don’t have to spend a long time in sales to be able to determine whose DNA is more for nurturing relationships, as opposed to the hunter who needs to kill to feel that adrenaline. Try putting the zookeeper at desk and ask them to make cold calls… it’s like they have broken arms – they just won’t do it. It’s something that we see a lot and is a huge challenge for companies and sales leaders with aggressive sales targets.

That’s why Peak Sales Recruiting is so important – recruiting great sales talent is no easy task and it takes specific expertise to recruit the best. In fact, I just finished with a local client and we needed a hunter to join the sales team. I told them that they needed a search firm. They/we needed a firm that was going to do the job right, because there are no unemployed good hunters – they are incredibly rare. My client needed someone who understands recruiting, and how to find and attract a candidate who is not actively looking for new opportunities. I’m a huge fan of search and recruiting when done properly because there is nothing more important than getting the right talent, particularly when the requirements are so specific.

While we are on this line, you said that there is a sales talent shortage and you talked about the ratio between ‘A players’ versus ‘non A players’ on a sales team. Can you speak about why great hunters are so rare?

I’m a little confused myself. My gut tells me that, for the most part, when you look at the last 25 years in business, we have mostly had good economies. If you take out the internet bubble burst in 2000 and 9/11, and the slow down as a result of that, we’ve had a great run through the 90’s and most of the early 2000’s (mostly fuelled by the housing bubble that didn’t burst till 2008). If you take those bubbles out (finance bubble, internet bubble), I think the economy has been strong. So many sales people benefited from being in a strong economy or working in a ‘hot’ industry, that you could be a zookeeper or a farmer and do really well because nobody needed you to hunt. So, nobody realized that you weren’t a salesperson; you were great at managing, or because you were relational, knew your industry, or product, you got by. And it wasn’t until the ‘tide’ went out and you were standing there naked and no one was calling you anymore to buy something, that sales leaders realized that these people weren’t going to hunt.

So maybe it’s always been a certain percentage of hunters that were always ‘on top’, but I don’t know that sales leaders really understood the difference between reps when things were good and everybody had enough business. So when things got bad, the smoke finally cleared and the contrast between the good, great, and bad sales people became blatantly obvious.

There is a lot of truth to what you are saying. So how can companies do a better job at attracting the right sales people?

When recruiting, you promote the fact that you have a healthy, pro-sales culture. You promote the fact that the company has a leader who wants each member of the sales team to be successful, and who is more interested in making others a hero instead of being ‘the’ hero. You also promote the fact that there is a great comp plan that is structured to reward people for great performance. I mean, let’s be honest, that’s the reason that most people leave their jobs: they don’t like the plan, manager, or culture. Culture is huge; you cannot overstate the power of a pro-sales culture versus an anti-sales culture.

Why is sales culture so powerful?

Because it is the ingrained behaviors and attitudes of the whole sales organization, it flows down from the top, and is almost impossible to change. Unless you change the people, you cannot change the culture.

In my early career, I only worked in healthy pro-sales cultures. I did not know there were things such as an anti-sales culture until I went to work at a little tech company and discovered that my life was very bad. They did not understand sales, the emotion of a salesperson, and the environments where salespeople work well and excel. It took a few consulting engagements on my own to realize that a healthy sales culture is more rare than I ever imagined. There are a couple different chapters in the book that unpack the elements of an unhealthy sales culture, and in one chapter in the second half of the book, I take the time to describe this one company that had the single most healthiest culture that I have ever seen.

So if i’m running my company or sales team and thinking that I have to make sure we have a pro-sales culture, what are the top 3 things I have to make sure I’m doing?

I think one of the biggest detractors in a sales culture is a high ego “sales expert senior executive” who is either the founder or really involved in the business at the “micro-manager, control-freak” level. This is the founder who has not let go, even though his company is still producing revenues in excess of $40M. He still wants to see call reports from all 15 sales people; not just sales reports, pipeline reports, but activity reports. Even if there is a vice president of sales, the owner or founder can’t or won’t let go. It is the same guy that comes to sales team meetings and pontificates and tells you what to do and how to do it, and this is the same high-ego idiot executive that comes into meetings with customers and brags about how smart he is and says stupid political things. This is the guy who tells you to ask a lot of good questions on sales calls but when you take him in front of a customer he’s talking 80% of time about benign or in appropriate things.

As sales people read this article or my book, they applaud because they are thankful that I would say this. So part of the sales culture problem is the guy at the top is clueless; he’s an ego manic and needs to let go. It is the biggest destroyer of sales morale you can imagine. So, the biggest factor in a great sales culture is having an executive that is pro sales and who is committed to helping the sales team. He or she needs to invest the time mentoring the sales manager to spend time on the right things. At the end of the day, it is the executive who changes everything!

“part of the sales culture problem is the guy at the top is clueless; he’s an ego manic and needs to let go.”

So how should the sales manager/leader spend his or her time to create the sales culture that everyone wants? I would argue that the 3 most powerful ways to create a pro-sales culture and a high performing sales team are 1) The manager needs to meet one-on-one with his or her people regularly. Accountability and coaching meetings are absolutely critical and it’s usually not happening enough! 2) Conduct productive sales team meetings. Too many meetings are about operations and have nothing to do with sales, and the sales people are often permitted to show up late and with bad attitudes. 3) The sales manager has to get out from behind their desk and stop living with their head buried in the CRM screen and in spreadsheets. They also need to stop managing people by email. They need to get out of their office and sit with the sales team, and spend time with their team on the front lines.

Effective sales managers debrief after visiting with prospects to discuss what the sales rep did well and what could be done differently to be more effective next time. The best sales managers focus on the results of their reps and ensure they hold them accountable. They are committed to coaching their reps on the skills required to penetrate accounts and close deals.

In your book, you outline the format for effective one-on-one meetings and sales team meetings. What are the elements sales leaders need to focus on?

Instead of talking about nonsense, leaders need to start with results – what was added to the pipeline and what was moved? Then, talk about activities if the results aren’t there. Sales leaders really have no choice but to ask about activities if their reps aren’t producing. And, I don’t take credit for this, but my old sales manager and my good friend, Donnie Williams, modeled that for me when I worked for him and it was the best thing that I have ever seen. He would come to my office, go through my sales results and ask why they weren’t better. And if they were not stellar then we would look at my pipeline and he would ask why I did not close certain prospects. He would ask targeted questions about my approach, and ask what I had in store for the upcoming month and remainder of the quarter. So, the formula for effective one-on-one sales meetings is simple: Focus on results, then pipeline, then activity. Nobody can accuse a manager of being a micromanager if you start with results, pipeline, and activity levels since nobody wants to be asked how they manage their time.

“the formula for effective one-on-one sales meetings is simple: Focus on results, then pipeline, then activity.”

You mention mentors and their impact on your selling career. Talk a bit about the importance of mentoring from a sales context.

I don’t know if I could put a quantitative value on how mentors have impacted my life. From my dad, to the CEO of Slim Fast, to my first sales manager; these guys invested in me, worked with me, talked business with me, modeled behavior and then held me accountable. We all need mentors, whether it’s in your personal, spiritual, or business life.

Imagine if a newly married couple had an older couple with a healthy marriage around. A couple that they could watch to see how they interacted with each other and how they live life. Imagine the benefits the couple would realize; it would be huge! It’s the same thing in business. What’s sad is in the name of being lean, so many companies have decided that everyone should do three jobs, which is why so many sales managers are dying. Companies today are making the sales manager do so many other things that have nothing to do with sales leadership, like conducting product reviews or being apart of meetings that sales really has no business participating in. At the end of the day, the sales leader can’t even breath – they have 250 emails to return and don’t have time to mentor anybody. But when they get yelled at for unreturned emails, what do you think they’re going to be spending their time doing?

One of the things you mentioned is that the best mentors hold their reps accountable. Do you come across organizations that tolerate perennial underperformance from their sales people? Why is that a problem?

Not a lot, but enough. If you let a rep who’s not delivering stay around for forever, then you’re missing out on results that someone else could be delivering. The other issue is that you damage the sales culture by communicating to everyone else on the team that it is okay to fail here.

Unfortunately, I’m often brought into companies that have ‘niceness’ issues – they’re a family business, they have no turnover, the ownership is generous… now don’t get me wrong, these are great aspects, however, sometimes the leaders of these companies act like more of a charity than a business. So when I have to get a point across to a president, I’ll ask how many months in a row they would you let their controller be late with financial statements and tolerate them being inaccurate. Everyone of them says “I need accurate financials every month. I’d have zero patience for this.” OK, so you have no tolerance for under performance from your accounting department, so how come these six sales people out of your 12 have never hit their goal and they still work here?! They aren’t on a plan and nobody’s coaching them up or out and the executive never has an answer for that. Why is it OK for your salespeople to fail and not the accountants?

The argument I would make is that everyone else’s livelihood in the company is dependent on very few salespeople doing their jobs because nobody else creates revenue. It is exactly the reason why companies need to only recruit top performers. I am the last guy that wants to fire people and I’ve lost sleep over it since letting people go is hard. But, if you are managing people like I talked about in the book, and you have one-on-one meetings, and you’re clear on goals and results, and you publish sales results for the entire team to see, the rep shouldn’t be surprised when they are called out for missing their number. The sales manager needs to frame that conversation in a certain way – something like: “Hey Joe, you know why we are having this conversation – your results are not acceptable. Right now I am going to help you put a plan together to change that. We have 60 days to turn this around and we cannot keep you here if this is the level you are going to produce.”

I talk in the book how to remediate and coach up/out an underperformer, that is, if you think that they’re a keeper. This requires a lot of energy from sales managers and, in fact, I have a client right now that I’m instructing on how to coach up a rep who has not been hitting targets. They’ll know in 60 days whether or not the rep is up to the task. Having this type of conversation with a rep is not an emotional kind of conversation, it is a legitimate business conversation. Unfortunately a lot of managers don’t want to deal with it and put it off until its too late, and then they have perennial failure.

There is a concept in your book about the professional vs amateur sales manager. What is the difference between the two?

Think about amateur salespeople. Amateur salespeople are not coached, so, the same logic applies to sales managers. You see a ton of new sales managers making it up as they go because they have no idea what good sales management looks like since they grew up in an era where nobody showed them. Once CRM systems and email became popular, a lot of sales management best practices were thrown out the window, which is why you could call this book ‘old school’. Once sales managers put the principles found in Sales Management Simplified into practice, they realize the benefits of sticking to the basics and keeping it ‘old school’.

Peak Sales Recruiting would like to formally thank Mike Weinberg for taking the time to share his unique insights on effective sales management. Click here to learn more about Sales Management. Simplified. or if you are interested in purchasing the book, and we recommend that all sales managers do, click here. 

About Mike:

Mike Weinberg is a consultant, sales coach, speaker and author on a mission to simplify sales. His specialties are New Business Development and Sales Management, and his passion is helping companies and individuals acquire new clients. Prior to launching his own firm,
Mike had been the top-producing salesperson is three organizations.

Forbes, OpenView and several other publications have named Mike a Top Sales Influencer.

Mike is also the author of two Amazon #1 Bestsellers. His first book, “New Sales. Simplified.” – The Essential Handbook for Prospecting and New Business Development, spent a full year as the Top-Rated book in its category. And his latest book, Sales Management. Simplified. is being called “arguably the greatest book ever written on sales management, and an unequaled blueprint for leading salespeople and building high-performance sales teams.”

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• About
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Eliot Burdett

CEO at Peak Sales Recruiting

Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.

Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.

He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.

Connect:

Latest posts by Eliot Burdett (see all)

• 20 Of Our Favorite Books About Sales Management and Sales Leadership – October 20, 2023
• How To Make Progress On Your Sales Goal Without A Sales Leader – September 15, 2021
• Augment Your Recruiting Strategy During “The Great Resignation” – July 26, 2021

Peak conducts tens of thousands of sales interviews a year. The majority of candidates with whom our interview teams meet with are ambitious, capable, diligent, and accomplished professionals looking to advance their career. And quite simply, honesty is profitable. However, from time to time, we come across those candidates who are inclined to bend the truth about their career accomplishments.

Furthermore, some candidates are remarkably good at lying and if it weren’t for a series of useful tests and tricks we employ, they might slip through our process undetected. Luckily it is easy to spot most liars since they overconfidently assume they are smarter than the rest of us and that no one is on to them – arrogance is usually pretty easy to catch.

That’s why our assessment team offered to share the five most common lies they hear in interviews, what they actually mean, and how interviewers can extract the truth.

1. “I was laid off but it had nothing to do with my performance”. 

Real meaning – My previous employer didn’t feel I performed well enough to keep me on the team, but was kind enough to lay me off rather than fire me. It is almost always about performance and employers rarely part with a performer without a fight. (Related lie – I was on contract and left because the contract ended.)

How to get the truth: Request the candidate’s performance metrics over the past 5+ years.

2. “I can’t use my previous manager as a reference because I am not sure where they are now.”

Real meaning – We didn’t have a strong relationship when we worked together and still don’t. Previous employers offer significant insight into what it is like to employ a candidate.

How to get the truth: Request the candidate to provide you permission to contact other members of their sales team to describe their experience with the manager.

3. “I wasn’t able to be successful at my last company because the company didn’t support the sales team.” 

Real meaning – I need the sun, moon and stars to line up in order for me to make a sale. Top performers let nothing get in the way of closing business and don’t have time for excuses.

How to get the truth: Request that the candidate describe how they have successfully overcome challenges in their sales career. Be on the lookout for patterns in their ability to meet or exceed their sales targets in previous roles.

4. “My career is not about the money.”

 Real meaning – I don’t know how to make money or how to negotiate a good compensation package. Businesses exist to make profits and people work for money. Anyone who says it isn’t about the money probably doesn’t have much. Except in rare instances, it is about the money.

How to get the truth: Ask why the candidate is in sales. Ask about their lifestyle outside of the office and if they would take a pay cut to join your company.

5. “I worked for my wife’s consulting business for a year and a half.”

Real meaning – I interviewed for a year and a half, but couldn’t find employment, so I have put my wife’s home business on my resume to fill the gap. This is not a lie if candidate successfully closed several thousand deals and made his wife a millionaire.

How to get the truth: Ask the candidate why they are still not interested in working for the business.

If you have other lies you have seen, please post them below and we will be happy to share them with our readers.

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• About
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Eliot Burdett

CEO at Peak Sales Recruiting

Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.

Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.

He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.

Connect:

Latest posts by Eliot Burdett (see all)

• 20 Of Our Favorite Books About Sales Management and Sales Leadership – October 20, 2023
• How To Make Progress On Your Sales Goal Without A Sales Leader – September 15, 2021
• Augment Your Recruiting Strategy During “The Great Resignation” – July 26, 2021

We are living in a time of information overload. With no shortage of internal and external data, sales executives need to carefully choose the data and information they use to make sales management decisions and determine strategy. Otherwise, they risk getting overwhelmed with too many data points that could hinder a focus on what is truly important to success.

As every sales executive knows, a strong and effective sales force is a constant work in progress that must be carefully managed and monitored. Therefore, the data required to manage the sales force is likely to evolve with business needs and priorities. Moreover, the exact array of data that will be most helpful to sales executives is likely to vary depending on the situation and from business to business and from sales organization to sales organization.

Therefore, choosing data to track and analyze is not a one-time occurrence but something that, like the sales force itself, requires careful management. In general, this data will fall into two categories: (1) internal data gathered from new or existing data systems and (2) external data, including industry trends and economic data and statistics.

Finding the Right Data

When it comes to finding the right data with which to benchmark sales organization performance, there is plenty to be had. Some of it is free but more of it comes with a cost. For the purposes of this article, we will focus on free data and how sales executives can leverage that data in various ways.

Recruiting

Data derived from recruiting sales talent can be very useful and in some cases can not only shed light on recruiting problems but point to the root of bigger sales problems. For example, a report in the Wall Street Journal stating that, “Employers spent an average of 41 days trying to fill technical sales jobs, compared with an average of 33 days for all jobs,” can lead to a broader discussion of rebuilding so-called middle skills necessary for success in various jobs, including sales positions. For example, a recent report from Harvard Business School suggests that employers transfer supply chain concepts to finding talent:

1. Forecast, Planning, and Inventory Management involves identifying the skill and talent most important to strategic success, identifying potential skills gaps and planning for workforce needs.
2. Source and Procure requires cultivating a strong supply base for this talent.
3. Supplier Relationship Management means partnering with technical and community colleges to develop needed talent.
4. Make and Deliver focuses on the need for employers to invest in talent development instead of expecting talent to be developed elsewhere.

In other areas, specific data is not as meaningful and, instead, can provide what are essentially guidelines or ideas for managing different parts of the recruiting process. For example, when it comes to the right number of candidates to interview for a sales position, that number is often based on the hiring manager’s preference, talent pool, and design of the screening process. Some managers prefer to interview several candidates for a position to get a sense of who is available and what skills, talents and experience they bring to the table. Even if a strong candidate is not a good fit for a current sales role, there may be other available roles that are a good fit or the manager might want to keep that candidate in mind for future needs. However, other managers who are focused on making the hiring process as time and cost efficient as possible rely on a structured and rigorous screening processes that leverages email, and telephone interviews, in addition to third party psychometric assessments, to identify only the top three or four strongest candidates for deep, face-to-face interviews.

DePaul University’s Sales Leadership Center offers some basic benchmarking data on the recruiting process that can be useful for sales leaders. While some of this data is time sensitive and should be considered from that standpoint, much of the recruiting-related data is relatively timeless. For example, when gauging an appropriate number of interviews for new talent, the DePaul data found little change in company habits from earlier surveys. Three interviews (39 percent of companies) appears to be the “sweet spot” of not too much and not too little interaction with candidates. However, a significant number of companies limit interviews to two per hire (28 percent) or four interviews (16 percent). Our experience over the years tells us that three interviews, consisting of stakeholders from a variety of business units (marketing, HR, sales, and members of the C-suite) works best to mitigate hiring risk by reducing bias and eliminating the irrational gut instinct that often grips hiring managers.

The survey goes on to highlight the amount of time companies spend with candidates before extending an offer. Two to three hours is the most common amount of time (43 percent of companies), followed by four to five hours (26 percent). Interestingly, a significant number of companies (14 percent) spend less than an hour with candidates before hiring, while 12 percent spend six to seven hours with them and 5 percent spend more than eight hours with candidates.

Since sales people are expert interviewers, the time invested by hiring managers during the interview process should not be underestimated. With four out of ten reps missing sales targets every year, the necessity to make the right sales hire through a rigorous interview process that seeks proof of success in similar sales environments is what sets apart world-class hiring organizations from the rest. [Click here to view the ultimate list of sales interviewing questions]

Sales success

The DePaul University data also offers a good sanity check for sales managers concerned about particular problems with the performance of individual sales reps and the sales force as a whole. For example, a sales manager who wants to compare the percentage of sales reps who reach their quotas in a given year will find that the 600 companies surveyed said that 38 percent of their sales representatives were at quota, 33 percent above quota and 29 percent below quota. Other data includes percentage of sales as new business, profit/sales ratios by industry, and sales and profit per employee by industry.

Broad-based surveys like this have their drawbacks. Sales organizations in different companies and industries vary greatly. A 2013 sales survey published in the Harvard Business Review found significant differences in quota attainment by industry. Just over half of sales reps in software companies (52 percent) reached their quotas, while reps in computer hardware (60 percent), cloud/software-as-a-service (61 percent) and telecommunications (66 percent) companies performed much better.

Looking at sales data also provides some insight into which sales metrics companies tend to track. For example, the HBR survey focuses on and provides benchmarking data for what it considers the 12 most important sales metrics:

1. percent of organization achieving quota
2. quota attainment average
3. average annual quota for field salesperson
4. average annual quota for inside salesperson
5. average annual on target earnings
6. average new deal size
7. sales cycle length
8. vertical sales adoption
9. percentage of sales reps selling to small and medium-size businesses
10. field sales revenue
11. management of inside sales roles
12. sales preparedness

Other surveys and some sales gurus advocate for focusing on a smaller number of metrics, such as open and closed opportunities per rep and win rate or lead flow, qualified opportunities, conversion rate and booked revenue. In other words, data alone doesn’t tell the story. What is being tracked and focused on is often just as helpful.

Sales compensation

Free basic sales compensation data is relatively easy to come by. However, the quality and utility of that data varies considerably.

Government sources. Perhaps the most useful free source of sales compensation data for companies with U.S. operations is the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Occupational Employment Statistics series. This survey provides a wealth of free and comprehensive pay data broken down into several categories:

1. national (U.S.)
2. state
3. metropolitan area
4. industry
5. ownership type

Sales executives can leverage these categories to create various subsets of data to meet their needs. While the job categories may be broader than most companies use, this data can be a good starting point for benchmarking pay levels. It is important to note, however, that BLS data is not broken out by type of compensation—i.e., how much of total pay is made up of base salary and incentives.

Online salary sites. While compensation data from free online services, like Salary.com, can be useful in some ways, sales executives should approach this data with extreme care. The key drawback of using this data is that it may be out of date and its accuracy cannot be verified. Much of the data is self reported, meaning that individuals provide the information on their own job position and compensation. Therefore, sales executives who want to use this type of compensation data should not rely on it alone. However, they can use it to supplement any other verified compensation data sources they are using.

Association surveys. Industry and professional associations are good sources of compensation data. Not only are these surveys targeted to specific professions or industries, these groups may also provide free or discounted survey reports to organizations that participate and provide data for these surveys. WorldatWork, a compensation trade association, provides a high-level report on its annual pay survey. The free data covers only four categories of workers—non management/non union hourly, non management salaried, management salaried, and officers/executives. However, the survey includes data from more than 5,500 organizations and it provides basic salary increase data from 19 countries.

Consulting firms. Various compensation consulting firms usually provide high-level results from their annual compensation surveys. This data , however, may not broken out by type of position (instead, it might use broad categories like pay for hourly employees, salaried positions and executives).

In some cases, these survey reports offer some sales-specific data. For example, Mercer’s 2014/2015 Compensation Planning Survey identified sales professionals as one of the positions for which it is most difficult to attract and retain talent. Another data nugget is the fact that both public and private companies offer target incentives for sales professionals equal to 20 percent of base salary. It is important to keep in mind the broad-based nature of these surveys. For example, our own data suggests that senior B2B reps compensation packages, regardless of industry, provide an even 50/50 split between base salary and commission incentives. The breakdown of these incentives in the Mercer survey is heavily weighted toward individual performance (about 50 percent), followed by organization, division and department metrics, which align with our internal data sets.

Consulting firms that specialize in sales compensation also provide high-level survey results that are obviously going to be more focused on sales. For example, The Alexander Group provides high-level reports on various aspects of sales compensation (registration required), including revenue growth expectations (average of 12.8 percent), incentive budgets (average of 4.9 percent) and base pay increases (average of 3.2 percent). Other firms offer industry specific survey reports, such as this one from ZS Associates and Reality Works on the high tech industry.

Industry and economic trends

Industry and macroeconomic data are also important elements of sales management. The obvious use of external data is to keep up with customers and the challenges they face, not to mention understanding how those challenges can impact customer budgets and purchasing behavior. However, industry and economic data also have important implications for companies recruiting sales talent.

The most logical use of economic indicators involves gauging the economic issues facing the sales force in different parts of the country and the world, which could significantly affect a company’s ability to acquire new customers and sell more products and services. From a recruiting standpoint, this data allows sales executives to present a stronger case for increasing sales force headcount, as well as obtaining additional resources or anything else for the sales organization, by showing how that spending will drive more revenue.

This is especially important when working with peers in finance, operations, marketing and even the CEO. By showing what this data and information mean to the business from a sales perspective, sales executives can demonstrate an understanding of the company’s and its industry’s business cycle and the underlying economics driving company performance.

Employment data on the local, state/regional and national levels can be useful when making hiring plans. If the company routinely looks nationally or internationally for talent, the data they track would naturally expand accordingly. The U.S. Department of Labor maintains a web page with a list of employment-related data sources. The BLS also has a comprehensive list of available data, tables and calculators by subject. The Conference Board is another source of broad employment-related data. For companies with operations in Europe, the European Commission maintains several data sources. Our sales hiring landscape series also provides employers a detailed overview of key markets such as Chicago and Boston.

Finally, sales executives might also want to track specific industries, including their own, to see how economic developments might help or hurt the company’s ability to hire sales professionals from companies in those industries. For example, if sales professionals from a particular industry are often a good fit for the company’s sales force, tracking the performance of those industries is critical. This way, if a certain industry is heading toward a slump, the company might have a better chance of recruiting some of the key sales talent from those companies. News about mergers and acquisitions in industries from which the company recruits sales talent is also useful. After all, these transactions create uncertainty and often make sales talent more open to new opportunities.

Choose Carefully

These free data sources are just the tip of the iceberg for sales executives. It is possible to track data and create metrics on just about anything these days. However, more data is not necessary better.

When looking for and tracking data, the key is to make sure that data is crucial to business and sales success. Otherwise, these efforts can become more of a confusing burden than an aid to better sales decision making.

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• About
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Eliot Burdett

CEO at Peak Sales Recruiting

Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.

Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.

He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.

Connect:

Latest posts by Eliot Burdett (see all)

• 20 Of Our Favorite Books About Sales Management and Sales Leadership – October 20, 2023
• How To Make Progress On Your Sales Goal Without A Sales Leader – September 15, 2021
• Augment Your Recruiting Strategy During “The Great Resignation” – July 26, 2021

The  interesting  thing  about  management  is  that  the  role  is  commonly  misunderstood.

Stop  and  think  about  what  usually  gets  someone  promoted  to  a  management  position.  Typically, it’s  the   results he  or  she created  in  a  previous  position.  In  other  words,  people  move  up  the corporate food chain based on knowledge, skill, or, most commonly, performance.

Especially  salespeople.  Typically,  it  is  the  top  salesperson  who  is  picked  to  become  the  next manager.

And,  more  often  than  not,  the  great  salesperson  struggles  as  a  manager.  Why?  Because  they  are two   different roles  and require  two  completely  different  skills  sets.  And  great  players  often  make terrible   coaches.

But  companies  make  it  worse.  They  typically  require  that  sales  managers  focus  on  management tasks, like  sales automation, CRM,  proposals,  slide  decks,  budgets,  reports,  policies  and procedure, things  like   that.  Which,  at  first blush,  would  seem  to make  sense  since  those  things are important  and  necessary.

However,  they  pale  in  comparison  to  the  effect  your  leadership  skills  will  have  on  the performance  of  your   sales team.

Think  about  all  the  things  managers  do  that  have  NOT  been  mentioned:  recruiting,  hiring, performance management,  coaching,  creating  a  productive  culture,  communicating  vision  and purpose,  and  much, much  more.

These  are  all  leadership  functions.  And  to  call  them  critical  is  a  serious  understatement.

In  the  big  picture,  what  we  really  need  corporate  managers  to  do  –  when  it’s  all  said  and  done  –  is  to   identify, hire,  and develop  the  potential  of  capable  people,  and  to  create  a  culture  where that  talent  can   thrive.

Everything  else  is  just  support.  

Which  begs  the  following  questions:

• How  many  prospective  managers  are  actually  assessed  for  their  ability  to  identify  talent?
• How  many  managers  are  trained  to  hire  effectively?
• How  many  managers  would  get  strong  marks  for  coaching  and  training?

The  answer  is  very  few.

Instead,  we  continue  to  promote  top  salespeople  simply  because  they  are  great  salespeople.  But the   reality  is that  selling  is not  the  same  as  leading.

And  it  is  the  leadership  side  of  the  sales  executive  role  that  will  ultimately  make  you  or  break  you  as  an   executive.

4 Keys to Success as a Sales Executive  

When  sales  teams  underperform,  companies  often  struggle  to  find  the  root  causes  of  the problem. So,  in   search of  answers, pricing  strategies  are  dissected.  Marketing  plans  are scrutinized. Software  is  replaced.

In  my  experience,  however,  the  problem  is  usually  not  price  or  product  or  marketing  or  tools. Sure,  those   things may  need to  be  addressed,  but  the  causes  of  underperformance  are  often systemic  and/or   structural.

And  this  is  where  sales  leadership  is  extraordinarily  important.  Why?  Because  the  leader  is directly   responsible for  the systemic  problems.

Worse,  he  or  she  is  often  the  direct  cause  of  the  problem.

Let’s  look  at  four  leadership  ‘secrets’  you  need  to  address  to  be  successful  in  the  Sales  Executive role.

1.  Acquiring and developing talent is far and away the most critical element of  your  job.

Big  secret,  huh?  Like  you  don’t  know  this  already.

But,  even  recognizing  the  critical  importance  of  identifying  and  recruiting  top  talent,  how  many   organizations  do  it  well? The  answer  is  very,  very  few.  Sales  teams  are  rife  with  average  players   with  loads  of  excuses.

Whose  fault  is  that?

You  hire  reactively.  You  have  no  strategy  for  identifying  and  acquiring  great  players.  Your  on-­ boarding methodology  is almost  non-­existent.  You  constantly  complain  that  you  don’t  have  time   to  train  your  people.

Bottom  line,  this  is  a  leadership  function.  Which  means  if  you  don’t  do  it,  nobody  else  will.  So, if you  want  to jump  to  the top  of  the  class,  make  this  your  most  important  priority  and  focus  on it every  single  day.

Identify.  Recruit.  Hire. On-­board.  Train.  [And  repeat]

[bctt tweet=”You don’t win championships with average talent. “]

And,  not  surprisingly,  average  leaders  don’t  develop  great  salespeople.

2.  How  you  deal  with  sub-­par  performance  will  define  you  as an  executive.  

Since  talent  is  so  important  to  your  success  (see  No.  1),  the  way  in  which  you  manage  poor   performance  is critical.

But,  since  most  sales  managers  are  completely  underwater  with  all  the  management  tasks  they   are  required  to complete, their  most  common  complaint  is  that  they  have  little  or  no  time  to coach,   train,  and  address performance.

And  this  is  a  HUGE  mistake.

Where  performance  issues  exist,  managers  –  especially  new  or  inexperienced  managers  –  often   struggle  to address  those issues.  The  conflict  is  very  real,  and  most  people  don’t  enjoy  the   confrontation  that  is  necessary  to talk  candidly  about sub-­par  performance.

So,  they  employ  a  number  of  non-­confrontational  approaches,  including  sticking  their  heads  in the sand  and hoping  things will  get  better.

But  allowing  underperformers  to  remain  on  the  sales  team  is  damaging  from  a  number  of   perspectives.  Overall team performance  suffers.  Top  performers  resent  it.  And  your  leadership   credibility  suffers  dramatically.

Remember  this  critical  message: “A” players want to play on winning teams, and they won’t stick around very long with average leaders.

3.  Creating  a  ‘no  excuses’  culture  is  critical  to success.  

If  you’ve  been  in  sales  management  more  than  a  few  months,  you’ve  heard  the  excuses:

• My  territory  (or  market)  is  different.
• The  economy  is  killing  me.
• Our  prices  are  too  high.
• The  competition  is  giving  it  away.
• I  have  to  spend  too  much  time  with  our  CRM  software.

That’s  just  for  starters.  There  are  plenty  more.

Leadership  is  often  about  distinguishing  between  the  very  real  obstacles  that  impact  success,  and   those  excuses that  serve only  to  mask  poor  performance.

It  is  critical  to  understand  that  allowing  salespeople  to  use  excuses  and  blame  circumstances  for   their  failures will  quickly define  your  sales  culture.  And  excuses  make  it  almost  impossible  to   identify  and  address  the  actual issues  that  impact sales performance.

Having  been  in  sales  for  more  than  three  decades,  I  know  that  there  are  any  number  of  factors   that  can adversely  impact results.  No  question.  But  the  primary  difference  between  top   performers  and  pretenders  are how they  respond  to  those factors.

Great  players  find  ways  to  win.  They  refuse  to  be  deterred  by  anything.  They  take  personal   responsibility  for their  own success.

And  great  sales  executives  make  that  trait  a  non-­negotiable  part  of  their  sales  culture.

4. Creating  competition  is  critical;  creating  silos  will  crush  you.

There  seems  to  be  a  significant  trend  towards  not  posting  sales  numbers  or  even  publicly   recognizing  top  performers. Which  is,  as  plainly  as  I  can  put  it,  ridiculous.

If  that  is  your  practice  as  a  sales  executive,  you  can  rest  assured  that  “competitors”  –  people who are  motivated to  compete and  win  –  will  work  somewhere  else.

Sales  is,  by  definition,  a  competition.  When  your  team  wins,  everyone  else  loses.  And  when  your   competition wins,  there is no  consolation  prize  for  second  place.

Creating  a  team  that  competes  is  absolutely  critical.  Salespeople  need  to  be  willing  to  do   whatever  it  takes  – legally, ethically,  and  morally.  They  need  to  be  willing  to  work  whatever hours   are  necessary  and  improve  their knowledge  and skills  as  circumstances  demand.

They  need  to  be  driven  to  compete  and  win.

However,  allowing  that  competition  to  create  organizational  silos  will  quickly  result  in  enormous   problems. Competition needs  to  external,  not  internal.

If  you  are  not  aware  of  the  tendencies  of  salespeople  to  do  horde  resources,  monopolize  assets,   and  create internal conflicts  in  an  attempt  to  get  ahead,  you  haven’t  been  managing  long.

As  a  leader,  you  should  create  a  culture  that  recognizes  and  rewards  individuals  who  play  to  win. Post  your numbers. Celebrate  wins.  Give  most  of  your  attention  to  the  players  on  your  team  who have  a  burning  desire  to be  at  the  top  of  the charts.

But  don’t  ever  allow  individual  competition  to  create  silos  inside  the  company.

-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­-­

For  more  information on Kelly,  visit  www.BizLockerRoom.com.  

To purchase his book 1-on-1 Management: What Every Great Manager Knows That You Don’t, click here. 

To purchase his book Quit Whining and Start SELLING: A Step-by-Step Guide to a Hall of Fame Career in Sales, click here. 

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Eliot Burdett

Latest posts by Eliot Burdett (see all)

• 31 Must-Know Sales Follow-Up Statistics for 2024 Success – December 21, 2023
• 7 Success Characteristics That Define Top Performers – December 19, 2023
• 5 Reasons Your Top Employees Quit (Stop Doing This to Stop Them Leaving) – December 14, 2023

“Good luck!”

Who doesn’t love to hear those words?

Typically, they are words of encouragement. Joyful, even enthusiastic. Designed to leave someone with pleasant feelings about the future.

They are NOT, however, designed to be the two words that describe the sum total of a company’s training program.

Really.

Back when I started as a sales representative for a west coast medical company, I went out to corporate headquarters for a 2-day, new-hire training session. Or so I thought.

My first day on the job, I went on a couple of sales calls with a sales manager. We said hello, picked up a couple of small orders (literally, we picked them up, they were written on a piece of paper and left for us), and headed back to the office. After lunch, someone spent some time showing me some of the company’s products and where to find them in a catalog. They were just showing me the products — not explaining or doing anything, you know, instructional.

Then we had a three-day national sales meeting. And I headed back home. “Good luck,” the boss said.

I’m gonna need it, I thought to myself. Training? You can’t be serious. It wasn’t training, it was a disaster. Disorganized. Disjointed. Dis-aster.

One week in and I’m thinking the decision I made to join the company was exactly that – a disaster.

What Does YOUR Training Look Like?

People often ask about sales leadership roles (National Sales Manager or VP Sales or something similar) and ask what it takes to be successful at that level. While there are a number of critical pieces in that puzzle, few, if any, are as important as a comprehensive training and development plan.

But I never cease to be amazed at companies that provide little or no training (initially or ongoing) for their salespeople or their sales management team — outside of product-related training.

Worse, they can’t understand why employee commitment and performance are lacking.

But when a company fails to provide comprehensive and ongoing training and development a couple of things happen, neither of which is good for the company.

First, employees that aren’t well-trained rarely perform up to their potential.

Why would they? Even elite athletes, singers, and stage performers train and train and train. In fact, research clearly indicates that the very best performers get that way through focused, purposeful, long-term training. They are constantly learning, and consistently honing their skills.

Remember, there is a world of difference between twenty years of experience and one year of experience twenty times.

Second, when a company doesn’t invest in training, it sacrifices employee engagement, which, in turn, translates directly in to increased employee turnover, less productivity, and declining morale.

Employees make the direct connection: you don’t want to invest in my training and development, but you do consistently ask me to improve my performance.

No contradictions there!

Recent research indicates that companies who ignore the development of employees at all levels do so to their own detriment. In Profit at the Bottom of the Ladder: Creating Value by Investing in Your Workforce, researchers found that “offering training and career tracks to line workers led to lower turnover and easier recruitment, and served to make employees more efficient while they were with the company.”

Translation: investing in training saves you lots of money.

But We DO Train Our Salespeople

Many sales leaders get a little testy at this point. “We DO train our salespeople,” they say. Maybe they do; maybe they don’t.

In my experience, most employee on-boarding processes are random, disorganized, or incomplete. How would you answer the following questions for your sales organization?

• Do you have a script for the first 60 days for new salespeople? Does that script include milestones, minimum expectations, testing, ?
• Do you require salespeople to test regularly in the first six months for core knowledge acquisition?
• Do you require salespeople to demonstrate proficiency in specific product or service sets prior to releasing them to make calls?
• Do you provide selling skills training and test for proficiency?
• Do you have a process for putting new salespeople in the field with senior salespeople or managers during the on-boarding process? Does the “trainer” have a checklist of specific skills/topics to review/demonstrate during that time?
• Do you even check to see if salespeople can complete an effective sales presentation?

Yes, most people hate “role play.” Many “experts” argue against doing role play. They say that people don’t like to role play, and the scenarios don’t play out like the real world and on and on.

But they don’t have a leg to stand on. Very few people LOVE to practice. Most would rather avoid the scrutiny of their peers or management staff. But the truth is that you are guilty of sales malpractice if let your salespeople practice on customers. Unless, of course, you are more than willing to lose that opportunity. In that case, knock yourself out. Live role-play is even better!

Here is what I see consistently:

Few companies have an intentional and measurable approach to on-boarding new employees.

Few companies have a set of milestones and minimum standards established for testing during the first 60 days of a new employee.

Few companies provide purposeful career-development programs for their sales teams (managers and salespeople).

Few companies provide training to develop critical selling skills. Their “training” regimen consists primarily of product orientation and sales administration (CRM, placing orders, budgets and reports).

And very few companies train their salespeople to develop a comprehensive sales plan for developing their business. CRM is one thing; a sales plan (a business plan) is quite another. The first is retrospective, the second is prospective. Big difference.

But all of these companies say exactly the same thing: ”We train our people.” Sure they do.

All I have to say is “Good luck!”

Start making your new sales hires achieve optimal output as quickly as possible. Click here and download our eBook – “The First 90 Days – How To Get Your New Sales Hires Producing Fast.”  

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Eliot Burdett

Latest posts by Eliot Burdett (see all)

• 31 Must-Know Sales Follow-Up Statistics for 2024 Success – December 21, 2023
• 7 Success Characteristics That Define Top Performers – December 19, 2023
• 5 Reasons Your Top Employees Quit (Stop Doing This to Stop Them Leaving) – December 14, 2023

We are approached by many companies seeking to hire their first sales person. This is an exciting time for young companies and often it is excess demand that seemingly requires the addition of a new sales person. In some cases, the founders are unable to effectively sell themselves and hope that hiring a new sales person will allow them to focus their time elsewhere. This is a grave mistake and we advise against hiring in these cases.

Hiring The First Rep is Usually a Huge Gamble

First and foremost, in most start-up companies, sales is the most important aspect of success. Hiring a new sales person is a huge gamble, so why would a founder want to take this risk and assign this most important aspect of success to someone else?

A fledgling company has no history of success that would dictate that the new sales person will be successful. Furthermore, customers dealing with a start-up, particularly if the offering is new, want to deal with company founders who know the offering intimately and can have meaningful conversations about the product benefits.  A founder has to accept the reality that a sales person in a start-up is like a boxer fighting with one arm tied behind his back.

So what if the sales person is not successful?

If the founders have effectively resigned from the sales effort and placed all the responsibility on the new sales person, and that new sales person fails to sell at the required clip, the founders have no contingency sales efforts to support cash flow requirements. They also don’t have the key customer relationships to pick up things if they are required to react quickly and jump back into the sales effort. Furthermore, the founders will not have been exposed to valuable feedback directly from customers on critical missing features and benefits in the product or service.

Even if the founders do not consider themselves strong sales people, they are usually capable of generating sales and we always recommend that they stay very involved in the sales effort until at least the company has successfully launched.

To your success!

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Eliot Burdett

CEO at Peak Sales Recruiting

Before Peak, Eliot spent more than 20 years building and leading companies, where he took the lead in recruiting and managing high performance sales teams. He co-founded Ventrada Systems (mobile applications) and GlobalX (e-commerce software). He was also Vice President of Sales for PointShot Wireless.Eliot received his B. Comm. from Carleton University and has been honored as a Top 40 Under 40 Award winner.

He co-authored Sales Recruiting 2.0, How to Find Top Performing Sales People, Fast and provides regular insights on sales team management and hiring on the Peak Sales Recruiting Blog.

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Latest posts by Eliot Burdett (see all)

• 20 Of Our Favorite Books About Sales Management and Sales Leadership – October 20, 2023
• How To Make Progress On Your Sales Goal Without A Sales Leader – September 15, 2021
• Augment Your Recruiting Strategy During “The Great Resignation” – July 26, 2021