The Biblical Sales Team Part 1 – Hiring and Firing Salespeople

This is my fourth post in 2024 writing about God, Jesus or Church.  I haven’t changed, it’s just that I have cast a wider net relative to sources for my many sales analogies!

I never read the Bible from beginning to end until I began reading it a few weeks ago. I am still reading Genesis (first book in the Old Testament) and I am amazed by what I have read so far.  And yes, there is a sales analogy here.

Are you so frustrated with your sales team that you think about starting over?

Do you have a sales team that you would love to scale?

You only need to look as far as the original founder, God, as a model for both.

It seems that God was not happy with the descendants of Adam and Eve, who weren’t following His plan. He decided to rid the earth of His first round of living creation – except for Noah and his family. You know the story of Noah, and after the Ark was built and loaded, God created a flood to terminate all remaining life on Earth, which he deemed as unworthy.  There were no idle threats, there were no exit plans, there was no severance plan, and there was no equity or inclusion.  Everyone had to go.  He terminated every living person and thing!  If God could terminate everyone except his key man, Noah, his family, and pairs of animals, then you can certainly terminate your under performing salespeople.

God entered into a covenant with Noah and told him to populate the Earth, promising to make him and his descendants fertile. Noah lived to be around 170 years old and his descendants lived for quite a long time too so it makes the 18 month tenure of a typical Sales VP pretty lame!

Noah and his descendants scaled like crazy, with descendants eventually having sons who were the great early biblical heroes, Abraham, his son Isaac, and Isaac’s son Jacob.  Talk about scaling!

God promised them land, riches, and children, as long as they honored God and his plan.

Companies can promise things too as long as the leaders follow the company’s strategies and business plans.

In order to accomplish His plan, God seemed fine with slaves, multiple wives, and incest, and while that’s not acceptable in society today, the sales and business analogy for that is to look anywhere and everywhere for opportunities, even if you’ve never done that before or haven’t done it that way.

Along the way there were more terminations – even God doesn’t get it right every time – but with a sizable population, God could appoint messengers to do his dirty work.  The picture below was displayed in the John F Kennedy Presidential Library and is a great example of God sending messengers to eliminate evil from the Earth.  If you can’t read it, the words on the bomb say, “Happy Easter Adolph.”  The sign laying on top of the basket with two bombs in it says, “Easter Eggs for Hitler.”

Given that God used terminations to achieve His goals and eliminate mistakes, there should be no reason that sales leaders can’t better utilize terminations.  More than 50% of all salespeople don’t meet annual quotas and haven’t for years.  Sales Leaders should be terminating salespeople at scale, but instead, fearful sales leaders create specialized roles, hoping that moving salespeople into a less demanding role will solve the problem. Unfortunately, the only thing it accomplishes is to create distraction from the real problem, as more salespeople, in more roles, are failing than ever before.

It is clear that God had expectations and goals, and was intolerant of non-performance, under-performance, and especially non-compliance.  If you lead a sales organization, why not follow God’s lead?  If you have tried to train and coach up your chronic under-performers (measured by meaningful KPI’s), replace them and don’t think that you’re being a bad person.