Ever had a sales person who spends most of their time internally trying to justify how great results are just right around the corner, spends a lot of time slicing and dicing their numbers and their forecasts and telling you over and over how an account is just about to close? Well those are the sales people who ain't going to make it. The best sales people are those who actually spend their time out selling and they're hard to pin down when it comes to the forecasts and numbers because they're so busy closing deals that they don't have time to report. The guy or the gal who spends a lot of their time analyzing and reporting and less time selling is the one that's in trouble and is fighting hard to sell internally to keep their job but not doing a good job of posting the numbers that you need from them.

When that happens, confront the individual quickly and say I need to get you back out and producing results, I don't care about the exhaustive analysis, and frankly, I don't want to hear any more about these accounts that you've told me over and over about which aren't seeming to move. So, if you've got a sales person like I've faced over my career, who are basically spending most of their time telling you how it's going to be in the future and that success is right around the corner, be suspicious. Tell them you don't want to hear it. Either get them to post the results or get them to move on down the road. By getting rid of or terminating people who are spending all of their time telling you about what they're getting and not doing it, you can free yourself up to have more time to hire great people who can actually go out and get the results.

If you need to hold somebody as a placeholder until you can replace them, that's fine. But don't compromise when it comes to getting rid of those people who really aren't capable of making the sales numbers that you need. Your ability to manage in sales is reflective directly by how fast and how honest an objective you can be in weeding out poor performance and recognizing that if they're selling internally they're really not selling for your company and they're not doing you any service.

Andrew Rowe

Cube Management provides sales acceleration services to emerging growth and mid-market companies in the technology, manufacturing, healthcare and business service sectors. The experts at Cube Management work across the entire spectrum of marketing, sales and business development to provide customized solutions that drive revenue and profit growth. Cube Management combines Strategy, Process & People to produce winning results.