Fix the system before you blame the person.

This company I spoke to hired three sales reps. Nine months in they had ZERO closed deals.

And they couldn't remember if there were even any qualified leads brought in.

You realize how dysfunctional you have to be for that to happen?

Long story short, they came to me convinced they had a sales rep problem. Wrong reps, no hunger. He was ready to clean house and start again.

So I asked a few questions.

What's in your CRM? "We don't have one."
What are the reps' weekly numbers? "We have no idea. No one tracks anything."
Who runs sales? "Technically me, but I check in at most once a month."

Does it take a rocket scientist to figure this out? No.

Does it take someone who understands sales to put the right systems in and stay on top of them? Yes.

You can't blame the hire when the hire was set up to fail

A salesperson needs four things to have a chance. A list of who to call. A number to hit every day. Someone looking at that number every day. And a place where every conversation gets written down so the next one is better than the last.

This company had none of the four. Not one. Three people showed up every morning to a job with no list, no target, no manager and no memory, and the owner's conclusion was that all three of them were lazy.

Firing them and hiring new reps won't fix it. It resets the same broken setup with new names and starts the nine month clock over. That's the expensive part. Not the salaries you already paid. The next nine months you're about to pay for the same result.

What "the system" actually means

People hear "system" and picture software. It's smaller and more boring than that.

A CRM that is actually used. Not a spreadsheet someone updates when they remember. Every call logged, every next step dated. If it isn't in there, it didn't happen.

Daily activity targets. Dials, conversations, meetings booked. A rep who makes 90 dials a day and books nothing has a script problem. A rep who makes 20 dials a day has a management problem. You can't tell which one you have if nobody counts.

Somebody who looks every morning. Once a month is not management. It's a status update. The rep who is drifting in week two will be gone by month six, and the only way you catch week two is by looking in week two.

A weekly call review. Twenty minutes listening to two real calls with the rep. This is where the script gets fixed and the rep gets better. Skip it and they stay exactly as good as the day you hired them.

Most reps only fail when they don't have support

Chances are they have talent. You hired them for a reason. What they didn't have was a manager, and you can't be the manager at one check-in a month while running the rest of the company.

So before you fire anyone, ask the three questions above about your own business. If the answers sound like the ones I got, the reps aren't the problem.

Fix the system before you blame the person.