Understanding the Sales Force

This is worse than mediocrity, more evil than a salesperson violating his non-compete, more horrible than complete failure, more disturbing than complacency, more serious than ambivalence and more disastrous than excuse-making.

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.

A sales manager from the company we discussed in ‘Retooling the Sales Force’ asked me about a candidate they were considering. He had mixed emotions: on the one hand, this candidate was actually borderline hirable, a rarity for them. On the other hand, the sales manager was frustrated over the lack of recommended candidates. Now that they were assessing candidates prior to interviewing them, he didn’t understand why so many of the candidates were not recommended.

Today we learned about a company that has 100% turnover – and they aren’t in the insurance business! This company burns out its 6-figure performers as well as the other 85% of the sales force, those who fail inside of 60 days.

While history proves that the gut is unreliable for predicting sales success and science provides accurate information to predict sales success, the smart, modern sales manager must take advantage of that information until he can prove that his gut is more reliable than science. Are you a smart, modern manager or a gutsy manager who relies on gut?