Leading a Sales Force: Making Tough Decisions for an Organization’s Greater Good

Your sales force—bet they’re fairly important to you, right? 

I understand how you feel because in my work, the sales force is very important to me, as well. 

When leading a sales force, your objective is to see them become sales champions, which involves topgrading. If you are unfamiliar with the term, ‘topgrading,’ my previous HRTools.com Insight, “Recruit and Develop Sales Champions: Topgrading Your Sales Force” covers it. 

Next, as referenced in the Insight mentioned above, I will review the term, ‘spot and remove,’ as it applies to leading a sales force.    

What do you do when faced with underperforming or ‘C’ level sales performers, who can end up hurting everyone else within the organization, and possibly hurting that which you’ve worked so hard to build? 

It’s painful. And everyone feels it. When you are faced with ‘C’ level sales performers, who simply do not possess the tools to do the job—for the sake of everyone—you may have to ‘spot and remove’ those performers. 

Now, I’m not talking about those ‘B’ level performers who, with some development, coaching and mentoring, have the potential to move up to an ‘A’ performance level. In contrast, you know it when you see it: those performers who will never rise above a ‘C’ level. What’s even more problematic, unfortunately, those poor performers can also drag down everyone else. 

No business can afford to allow this to happen, especially in these times. Instead, face it; you’ve made a mistake and action is required. You may have to end up spotting and removing those hiring mistakes. What’s more, you will want to figure out what went wrong and correct it. Because if you don’t, you stand the chance of losing ground on all the positives that you’ve worked so hard to achieve. 

So spotting and removing works hand-in-hand with topgrading your sales force. By spotting and removing those hiring mistakes as quickly as possible, you can avoid putting yourself in an even more frustrating position—where ultimately you may have to eliminate the bottom 20 percent of your sales force. Instead, you want to put yourself in the position of seeing that your entire sales team is driving at 100 percent. 

Perhaps I can even help you learn from one of my battlefield mistakes. I once made the mistake of putting a high producer into a management position when he didn’t belong there. It was a premature decision, and I was looking to bridge a gap. 

This multimillion-dollar-a-year performer ended up struggling for a year. He almost went into a tailspin; and only after extensive coaching and mentoring, did he work his way out of it and into performing well as a manager. Luckily we had the resources to work with him, but it was painful and it was a tall order. 

Here are my suggestions for avoiding such painful experiences:

1. Schedule multiple interviews, which will include taking multiple steps, as you develop your prescreening and selection processes.
2. Utilize professionally developed, scientifically based applicant assessment tools. These tools will help you objectively compare data, which is based on the results from those applying for your sales positions. For example, those positions can include solution selling, tangible selling, or consultative-based, etc. sales positions. You will want to be able to objectively compare and evaluate the data from your applicant-pool assessments.
3. Prepare to use the same approach, as described in number two above, when you’re developing training programs for your sales force. After they are hired, and they are onboard—and you’re looking to move people around or promote them—you will want to continue utilizing appropriately designed assessment tools.  
4. Develop metrics. These indicators will help you measure what is working versus what is not working. Why is ‘such and such’ working or why isn’t it working? Since you’re dealing with people, you will always have someone who isn’t working out for some reason. And you want to be able to look back at metric indicators and figure out why. 

In closing out this discussion, it’s very important more than ever right now to be careful when making your hiring decisions. Because of these tough economic times, you may be seeing some fairly desperate people. 

Understandably, most job seekers are trying hard to sell themselves, so it’s critical that you get the right people into the right jobs. If you don’t, three months from now, you could be faced with even bigger problems. If you hire the wrong person, it can be a problem for the entire organization, and no one can afford that right now.

Spotting and removing hiring mistakes works hand-in-hand with topgrading your sales force.