Blaming the Sales Person

• By: Alicia Dale
• On: 07/01/2009 08:08:12
• In: Sales Management
• Comments:

I’m fortunate in the fact that I have created a small company that is invested in the sales process. We started a calling campaign to help a company identify prospects. After three hours of calling my best caller didn’t get a nibble. In three hours of calling a caller can make approximately 60 dials and get perhaps 12 to 14 people on the phone. Karen was reaching decision makers. The answer she was getting is “we do that in-house, we don’t need that service”.

I will take that information back to my client for review. There are several ways we can tackle this challenge. We can target smaller organizations that don’t have the resources to provide the service in-house, we can change the geographic area, we can target a different area. What we are NOT doing is blaming the sales person. Blaming the salesperson for non-performance when they are following the right process is insanity and results in high turnover. Yet, many companies do this without looking at the process. If your sales person is not selling and they are doing all the right things, it’s time to take a close look inward at your product, service, pricing model, offering, competition. If you fire the sales person and hire a new one you’ll continue to run on a gerbil wheel,  with a process that is full of activity but no productivity.