The invoice cleared in January. Twenty-six thousand dollars. By March you had a salesperson. Good handshake, right background, three references who said the right things. You exhaled for the first time in a year. By November he was gone, and so was the recruiter, and so were eleven months you can’t get back. Here’s the […]
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The question: When to fire a salesperson? The number is behind. The rep is the same rep he was in March. And you’re running arithmetic in your head at [5:40] on a Thursday: let him go now and you lose whatever pipeline he’s carrying — keep him and you pay for another quarter of exactly
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The Economics of Ramp: Where the Cost of a Bad Sales Hire Actually Lives The new rep started nine weeks ago. You’re paying full salary. Full benefits. A phone, a truck allowance, a territory. What you’re not collecting is revenue — because the rep is “ramping,” and everyone in the building has agreed that ramping
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Month six. The number’s been soft for two quarters, and you finally sit the rep down to talk about accountability. You slide the Scorecard across the table. Weekly activity targets. Pipeline reviews. A 1:1 every other week where the numbers get read out loud. And the rep looks at you like you changed the deal.
Why the HR Handoff Keeps Pulling You Back In You did everything right. You defined the seat. You rewrote the job post to repel the wrong fit. You ran the structured interview with a rubric. You verified the Will to Sell, Sales DNA, and Tactical Skills with a Predictive Sales Assessment. You found the candidate
Why a Capped Sales Compensation Plan Keeps Pulling You Back In The offer letter went out Tuesday. Strong base. Modest variable. A cap on the variable to manage the budget — your CFO’s idea, and you signed off because that’s what a responsible sales compensation plan looks like on a spreadsheet. By Friday, the candidate
The Sales Hiring Blind Spots Series #7 | Why a Capped Comp Plan Repels Top Reps Read More »
Safe Return Doubtful: How to Write a Sales Job Posting That Attracts the Top 6% Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success. The ad is attributed to Ernest Shackleton, recruiting for Antarctica. Historians have never found
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The Scorecard Number Missing From Your Sales Hiring You know your cash position to the dollar. You know gross margin to the decimal. You can quote your backlog, your WIP, your DSO — from memory, on a Tuesday. Ask what percentage of your sales team are A-Players, and you’ll give me a guess. An optimistic
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Industry Experience Trap Keeps Pulling You Back In The candidate had twenty years in the industry. Knew every product, every competitor, every distributor by name. Could quote the spec sheet from memory. You hired them in three weeks because the resume was a fit and the interview confirmed they spoke the language. Six months in,
The Sales Hiring Blind Spots Series #6 | Industry Experience the Trap that Repeats Read More »
You hired the rep eighteen months ago. Strong interview. Strong references. Strong start. You called them a self-starter and let them run — that was the plan. You don’t have time to babysit a senior salesperson, and you shouldn’t have to. Q1 they hit their number. Q2 they were close. Q3 they missed. Q4