224: Audit Our Salespeople Expectations

<p>Really Understand Your Expectations Of Your Sales Team</p> <p> </p> <p>We hire people and they don’t perform as we expected.  The time passes and the numbers are not rolling in.  We thought they would be more proactive and more skilled at getting new business.  We fire them and start over again.  Except that in Japan, you can fire them, but replacing them is a different and difficult matter these days.  Recruiting salespeople is horrendous, so the retain component is the mirror piece we have to master as well.  Turning the tap on in the sink, with the plug removed, isn’t getting us anywhere and this revolving salesperson door is just that issue.  We are wasting a lot of resources.</p> <p> </p> <p>We are often the problem though.  I have a start-up founder client who is a nightmare.  I have interviewed all of his direct reports and finally the big man himself.  Actually, I don’t want to work with his company.  They can keep the money.  He is the issue as to why they are having such significant staff turnover.  He has a “plug and play” mentality with people.  When you find a problem, you just hire someone in to fix it and then go back to running around like a headless chicken as before.  In this case, the leader is the problem.</p> <p>‘</p> <p>His expectations are unrealistic with the current state of the market.  He thinks we are still back in the old days, when there wasn’t the same amount of job mobility and where people tended to stick around, because it was hard to get another job.  He had key people jump and rather than try and fix the problem, starting with himself, he just wants to throw another body at it. </p> <p> </p> <p>There are three areas where we need to audit ourselves and our expectations.  Are we sure of what we are looking for in our salespeople when we hire them?  If we hire a farmer and they don’t hunt, we fire them.  Whose fault was that?  Ours not theirs.  We need to know at the very start are we bringing in another farmer here or a hunter?  In Japan, farmers are much more numerous and so