No one would disagree that people are a company’s most important asset. If I were a CEO I would be challenging my management team to develop their employees and search for highly qualified talent to bring into the company; employees with fresh ideas and approaches.
In my thirty plus years of managing I don’t know how many times I was told by a failing sales professional that they had a bad territory or an account we couldn’t crack, only to have a different rep prove otherwise. A new set of eyes and a fresh approach, or perhaps another level of engagement, and the account opens up or the territory starts to produce.
So why is it that sales managers, some of which produce the results we are looking for, who have been in their assignments five or more years still have non-performing reps on their team? Given that they’ve had more than five years to put together a highly qualified team shouldn’t they be in a position where all members of the team are contributing? The only legitimate reason to not have a team full of contributors after two or three years in the position is due to your ability to promote people off your team into other assignments. Short of that, lack of focus on hiring and developing the correct employees has to be the cause.
The first thing that needs to change is senior management’s expectation of the front line sales managers’ responsibility to develop each member of their team. I’m sure there are more, but here are a few focus areas to support that initiative:
- A key metric would be balanced contribution from each team member. It begins with ensuring that each team member has a metrics based assignment to meet his quota commitment, that the rep possesses the correct skills for the assignment, and that each member is contributing to the expected level.
- There needs to be a company focus on what recruiter’s call “sourcing,” finding talent and developing a conversation with the individuals to attract them to your company.
- A willingness of management to balance fixed and variable compensation so that they pay the going salaries for top sales talent in their area of the country. Salary.com or Glassdoor are two Websites that can give you an idea what those competitive salaries are.
- A commitment from the sales manager to develop each member of his team. Here the focus needs to be on helping each team member develop strategy and tactics in each and every assigned account and measured through pipeline growth. Additionally, each sales professional needs a written developmental plan focused on their personal areas of development.
It is critical to have both the “will” and “skill” to be successful in a sales position. If you have team members that don’t possess both of these characteristics you should de-select them, cut them from the team. I remember one instance in particular while in a planning session for the upcoming fiscal year a sales manager had a rep beginning his third year having never achieved 60 percent of plan. Whatever was lacking in the rep was not the issue, it was clear he was telling us by his performance he couldn’t do the job. The question that produced the break-through moment for this sales manager was when I said, “What if you replaced this rep with someone as good as Eric (his best rep)? “ When he saw it as an opportunity to make his job easier, that’s when he agreed he would make a change.
Here is a little insight as to why sales managers tolerate non-performing reps: forthcoming sales managers will tell you that they aren’t protecting the non-performing rep, but rather that their toughest assignment is finding, on-boarding and training a new hire. They will tell you that the only thing worse than one new hire is two! They will also tell you that because their sales candidate pipelines are so thin and the selection process so weak that the odds of the first replacement succeeding are almost non-existent; they are hiring the “best of the worst.” They know that if they deselect the non-performing rep they will need to go through the new hire process two or three or more times to get that one rep that would be successful and productive. That’s why if you have coached them to have strong players in their pipeline and support them in hiring the best talent, they will be more aggressive in their approach.
Something else to look for would be a sales manager with non-producing reps that are not on individual development plans. Your salary and benefits are wasted on these individuals. Even if the sales manager is not compensated on a profit & loss statement, they should see these folks as an opportunity. They should either be developing them into high performance contributors or replacing them with someone who they can develop.
It is often said that the first line sales manager’s role in our industry is the hardest role in the company and maybe that is true, but the job should get easier if the manager is hiring reps with the potential to be developed and he is investing his time and energy in developing them. With a focus on continuous improvement of their teams’ the sales managers will help grow the company, while at the same time making their jobs easier.
