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Some of your salespeople are chronically weak – they just under perform and you don’t quite know where to begin to help them. Perhaps, you don’t even know how to help them so you just tell them to do more, try harder or keep at it. Maybe you give them your best ‘moves’ and hope they take. More often than not, you won’t be able to help but you will develop a closer relationship in the process, making it more difficult to terminate them when you give up.

You always know when salespeople aren’t prospecting. Their pipeline becomes stale – not empty mind you, just old. And finally, they aren’t closing enough business. You know it. You may or may not do anything about it. Some managers fire these people. Others ignore it. A few actually know how to provide coaching and motivation in such a way that they can fix the problem. But what happens when you know they’re aren’t getting it done and you aren’t able to say anything or do anything because you’re so uncomfortable with confrontation?

This particular President made a decision to hire 9 green salespeople because he could afford to pay them only $30,000. What he fails to realize is that it will take the better part of a year to develop 9 green salespeople to the point where they are closing business, other than by accident or luck, on a regular basis. So he invests $270,000 and sees very little revenue in return.

What would happen if he chose to hire 5 experienced salespeople instead?

We have discussed many of the problems associated with optimizing and understanding the sales force but it all comes down to consistency. There may be expectations, accountability and coaching. The same goes for motivation, effective recruiting, support, direction and guidance. When all of the salespeople consistently perform pipeline building-activities, most of the problems in a sales organization disappear.