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January 19th, 2009 Now is the Time to Upgrade Your Sales Team |
The current recession presents you with an opportunity to upgrade your sales team. Many high quality salespeople are out of work, and base salaries have come down. If you are fortunate enough to be hiring, now is the time to be aggressive. If you don’t have open hires, think hard about eliminating poor performers and replacing them with new staff.
We are all struggling to do more with less, as companies reduce their workforces, VCs (and Angel Investors) get tighter with funding, and customers are stingy with orders. You can make real progress by upgrading your sales team, no matter how large or small.
In our own hiring and in anecdotes from other managers, base salary expectations are down 20% or more from just a year ago. More importantly, many skilled sales people have been let go in the waves of layoffs that have dominated the news. Salaries down, supply up—in short, a buyer’s market.
The opportunity is obvious if you have open positions, but what if you don’t have budget for new hires? Take a hard look at your current team—we all tend to hold on to underperformers, particularly if they are selling something. I know I often hesitate to fire that marginal performer, because they do add top line revenue, even if it is not as much as they should. Now is the time to turn over marginal team members, and upgrade with new hires.
I don’t want to duck the ethical dilemma here. Firing a marginal colleague in the midst of a severe recession is not a pleasant duty, and will make for some sleepless nights. There is only a little solace in the thought that you are also creating an opportunity for someone else, hopefully of higher caliber. The bottom line is that you owe it to yourself and the rest of your team to take a hard look, and then make the tough decisions. Upgrading now increases your company’s chances of making it thorough the current recession intact.
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