Do you dream at night of your sales force closing all the deals in your pipeline only to wake up and realize that you still don’t have the Ferrari in your driveway and that very few of the leads you get ever turn into cash? Your company’s approach to sales might be killing opportunity. Just recently, the CEO of a Minnesota-based firm explained how his newly developed sales force was not selling a thing while chewing away at over a half a million a year in payroll. Within a year, the CEO had hired both a president and a national sales manager to take over the expansion of a firm that was growing at a rapid pace. Customers like Target and Wal-Mart were just a few of the household-name clients he had already secured. Yet with the hiring of the sales manager, something had gone terribly wrong. The new staff wasn’t making any money, and for the first time in the company’s history, customers were complaining. In order to get the business back in order, the fantasy of sipping Pina Coladas on golden beaches would have to wait.
The CEO had four basic problems. One, the sales manager was hired away from an extremely large firm where he was successful...