Did our Sales Evaluation Uncover Part-Time Job Selling Drugs?

A salesperson was arrested for growing pot and selling it. Can you believe it?

Recently, the same man participated in OMG’s Sales Force Evaluation at the company where he worked.  The evaluation showed that he was a very strong salesperson with tremendous selling skills, but it also identified a few telling issues:

• He wasn’t motivated to earn additional money;
• He didn’t enjoy the selling that he was doing for this company;
• He wasn’t committed to his sales success;
• He wasn’t trainable or coachable;
• He was unlikely to stick around.

The salesperson was terminated following his arrest.

If you read a sales evaluation with findings like these on a successful salesperson that worked for you, would you discount them?  Disagree with them?  Challenge the evaluation?  Challenge the individual?  After all, it’s not that unusual for a successful salesperson to no longer be motivated by earning more money, but it is very unusual when a successful salesperson no longer enjoys selling and isn’t committed to sales success.

We know how accurate the evaluations are, so we urge our clients to challenge the individuals in question.  However, since the evaluations uncover hidden issues and the clients weren’t previously aware of those issues, quite often they will challenge the evaluation since they “know” the person and the findings “just couldn’t be accurate”.

This doesn’t happen very frequently, but it does happen.  Why do you suppose managers prefer to push back on the findings rather than the person?  Do they know their salespeople that well or are they blinded by that person’s results?  Is the performance even a result of that person’s efforts or are they reaping the benefits of the hard work of the company, the prior rep, lucrative existing accounts or some other factor they aren’t responsible for?

It’s fine to push back on findings and evaluations, but when the evaluation is as accurate as OMG’s, one needs to push back on the salesperson too.