If you’ve hired a bad sales rep, you know how painful it is.
So what lessons can we learn?
Expert sales coach Barrett Riddleberger has some answers to share in this freshly penned column.
By Barrett Riddleberger
Bad salespeople get hired everyday. They can devastate a sales team and a company’s reputation. Recently, a friend told me over lunch about a sales rep he hired the previous year. This sales rep sold seven times the industry average of $1 million at his previous company. At $7 million in sales, he was a superstar. My friend (the CEO) and one of his sales managers snatched this sales rep up with great expectation.
After several months of ramp up they quickly noticed that he was not selling… anything. Confused, they investigated the marketplace, competitive landscape, economic conditions, product pricing, etc. Nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary. Their other sales reps were doing well, but he wasn’t. The sales rep failed to build a pipeline with which to set appointments and develop sales opportunities. This salesperson didn’t just fail to meet his sales quota, he sold absolutely nothing! He sold $0.00… the entire year! The bad salespeople syndrome severely inflicted my friend.
I asked for his sales rep to assess his sales personality, sales motivation and sales mentality. I knew if I could identify the source of the problem I could offer a solution. My desperate friend agreed to have his sales rep take the assessment. After reviewing the results, I asked my friend one simple question:
Did your sales rep acquire $7 million in new sales at his last job or did he inherit $7 million in existing business?
My friend stared at me with a blank look on his face. After a few moments of silence, he admitted that he never drilled down into the details of his sales rep’s previous sales success. During the hiring process, he assumed that the sales rep amassed all of those sales and new customers on his own. Later on, my friend found out that this sales rep inherited a large customer base from the previous sales rep who was promoted to a Sales Director position in another division of the company.
My friend hired a Farmer instead of a Hunter. This salesperson would never, ever prospect for new business. He was (and always would be) a cultivator of existing accounts based on pre-existing relationships. In essence, he was a warm-call sales rep.
My friend just shook his head in dismay. He lost $180,000 in salary. The lost sales over the previous 12 months were incalcuable.
Bad salespeople come in many forms. The lesson here is clear: every sales candidate possesses a specific set of capacities. As a result, some salespeople align better with certain sales jobs. Others do not.
Barrett Riddleberger is the founder and CEO of xPotential Selling, and the author of Blueprint of a Sales Champion: How to Recruit, Refine, and Retain Top Sales Performers.
