You wrote the job posting requirement yourself. Five years in the industry. Knows the product line. Knows the competitors by name. Let’s call it industry experience required. Then you handed it to whoever ran hiring and waited. Six weeks later, you have four résumés. Two are unemployed for reasons no one has put in writing. […]
The revenue report says he’s your best salesperson. Is he doing what you need a salesperson to do? Is he a hunter or an account manager? What do you need? Biggest book. Longest tenure. Every account in that territory has his cell number, and half of the accounts, he knows their family. When somebody says
Hiring an Account Manager: The Seat You Lost Control Of Read More »
It’s month seven and you’re still using the phrase: “He’s ramping.” You said it in month three and it was true. You said it in month five and it was mostly true. You’re saying it now because the alternative is admitting you know he is failing which means doing something about it. So here’s the
Price the Seat: The Sales Comp Plan That Attracts Closers Read More »
Why Sales Hires Fail: The Machine Breaks in One of Four Places Your last three sales hires failed three different ways. One never filled the pipeline. One interviewed like a champion and sold like a spectator. One took the offer, dragged through onboarding, and quit at month nineteen — right when the ramp math
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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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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
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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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