Understanding the Sales Force

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?

I noticed that one of the sales forces we evaluated this week had a lot of salespeople that were fairly new – either to selling or to the company – which, by itself, is not particularly alarming. However, the sales manager was investing only 10% of his time on coaching and accountability.