If you hire a salesperson who stinks at the job, how much is it going to cost you?

The most obvious expense is the lost sales.

Every day that a sub-par salesperson stays on the job, the company will be missing out on opportunities.

Prospects will choose the competitors over you, and existing customers may defect or place smaller orders.

Eventually, you’ll come to your senses and realise that you need to replace the poor salesperson, and that will be expensive as well.

According to the Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) it can cost “50 percent to several hundred percent of employee salaries” to replace a bad hire.

Making matters worse, there are also some less obvious costs that you might not consider.

Having just bad salespeople on the team can affect the entire organisation in four key ways:

They can weaken your company’s competitive position. In B2B markets, customers and prospects who choose not to buy from you are likely buying from your competitors.

That means every time you lose, your competition wins.

Over time, that can shift the market dynamics, making the competition look stronger than your company, even if they offer an inferior product.

They can create a terrible impression of your company amongst the prospects in their territories.

Psychologists say that while first impressions are very important, “last impressions are more important.”

They call this the recency effect.

For sales teams, it means that a prospect’s most recent interactions with you are going to make a bigger impression on them than all their previous interactions with you.

In other words, one bad sales call can counteract years’ worth of good impressions.

It could take you years to get back on a good footing with a particular prospect.

If you multiply that out across a territory, it’s easy to see how one bad salesperson is can have a lasting impact on your business.

They can cause problems for the people who have to support them.

In a recent, 95 percent of those surveyed said that a poor hiring decision affects the morale of the team.

When someone is bad at his or her job, people notice.

Everyone who interacts with that person—admins, sales, marketing, and lots of others—will be impacted by his or her incompetence. If the problem is severe enough, some may even choose to leave the firm.

They can cause resentment and discontent amongst the competent salespeople.

The morale problem is often especially pronounced among your best salespeople.

Everyone likes to be on a winning team, and when one person isn’t pulling his or her weight, the rest will notice.

If your salespeople have low morale, that could lead to further lost sales, exacerbating the entire problem.

So what can you do to avoid bad hires?

Every hiring manager makes mistakes on occasion, but there are things you can do to minimise the risk.

Predictable Success can assist with Assessing Core Sales Skills in the Hiring Process and provide some easy and cost-effective ways to weed out job candidates who don’t really have the sales skills you need.

While some of these methods do a cost a few bucks, spending a little money upfront could help you save tens or even hundreds of thousands later on.

Our mission here at the Predictable Success is to research and disseminate leading-edge practices and innovations in sales operations.

Predictable Success accesses a world wide community in which we bring together B2B sales professionals to help navigate a rapidly changing world by sharpening sales skills, enhancing?strategies and practices and providing a system for personal and professional growth so that sales people can make more money, be more respected,?be more recognized, and more influential.

So we’re always learning about different approaches, new technologies, changes in focus and priorities, what’s working well right now, what’s not panning out anymore, and so on.

Other people can teach you to sell.?We enable you to sell better!

These processes have worked with many of my clients for years and this systematic and disciplined approach has been a critical component to their success

The GOAL of every high-performance sales team should be to…… Proactively create the conditions where more deals, that are more profitable, with better customers, are the natural result.

This is achieved by engineering the overall sales process such that it reliably generates the desired outcomes as a matter of course.

?Predictable Success can examine your sales processes and deliver an accurate road-map after determining where you’re on track and where you need a course correction and can provide a cost/benefit analysis and expert recommendations to improve your sales performance on every level.

Want help designing customised sales strategy road-map want to deliver predictability, consistency, revenue growth and sustainability to your sales operations, call for a chat on 0432 622 744 .