Top Sales Manager Blog

An underperformer needs to be let go. But making such a decision is easier said than done. Any sales manager will tell you that. After all, a top-performing sales manager sees his sales people as more than just employees. But it has to be done—that is, if you want to stay as a top-performing sales manager in your company.

How do you put your foot down whether a sales person needs to be let go – for your benefit and his or her benefit? Ask yourself these questions:

1. Would I hire the same sales person again?
2. If he or she left the company today, would I feel happy or sad?

If your answers are “no” and “happy”, then you’ve got your answer.

These two questions are all you need to realize your sales team’s long-term proficiency. Any sales person in your team that collects the answers “no” and “happy” respectively should get the boot right away.

So how do should you do it? How do you fire an employee without breaking his or her feelings?

There are two ways, one of which I’ll discuss in my next post. In this post, we’ll talk conditioning a sales person to leave the company on his or her own accord, and that is by getting them to replace themselves.

Are you familiar with the Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) or any other variation of it? Simply put, PIP is a legal method, or simply an excuse, of Human Resources to fire an employee without subjecting the company to any age/gender/sexual orientation discrimination liabilities of any kind.

The Performance Improvement Plan tasks the sales person or employee to meet several specific criteria under a tight deadline. I don’t need to tell you that most employees who take the PIP fail at some point during the test. It’s okay, the test was designed this way.

Then Human Resources gives the employee another chance by appointing him two or three more chances to improve. Again these tests often are too difficult and aren’t very realistic. If the employee fails one of these tests again, which is likely, then the employee is let go.

It’s a little harsh, I know, but consider it as doing them, your sales people, a big favor. You are doing the underperformer a favor by allowing him to move on to doing things he or she is actually good at. You are doing your best sales people a favor by giving yourself more time to focus on them and not on your underperformers. Finally, you are doing yourself a favor by putting together a tight team of only the best sales people you can depend on, and that’s that.

The second method of letting underperformers go in my next post.

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I’m interested in hearing your feedback. Feel free to leave a comment after this post.

Filed under: Firing, Underperformers by ralphburns