Apr 16, 2025
The ad on social media said, “we are looking for sales A players”. I know the guy who put out the ad and he had recently moved to a new company, a new entrant into Japan and they were aggressively going after market share here. I was thinking I would love to be able to recruit A players for sales as well, but I can’t. The simple reason is that A players in Japan are seriously expensive. If you are a big company, with deep pockets in a highly profitable sector, then this is a no brainer. Why would you bother with B or C players, if you can afford A players? What do you do though, when you are running a small to medium sized company in a tough market, with thin margins and lots of competitors?
Being a leader, able to recruit the best talent, isn’t the same requirement as being at the sharp end of the stick, where you have to create something out of nothing on a daily basis. We have to take D players and turn them into C players and take C players and turn them into B players. Maybe we can even create the odd A player, given enough time and consistency. In theory, this sounds all very plausible and straightforward. Good so far, but how do you bring your talent alchemy to the forefront?
Leaders are pretty busy, so who develops these D, C and B people?
It stands to reason that the sales section heads or sales
department heads are not sales A players either, so their sales
role modelling is a limiting factor. The leader has to be
highly selective where they put their time and effort.
Pumping a lot of work into someone, to see them walk out the
door is heartbreaking, mind numbing, costly and depressing
stuff.
Adjusting expectations is a big factor in leadership. Trying
to thread a camel through the eye of a needle takes time. So
we cannot expect new people to be producing results any time soon.
Having a really good record of salespeople results is a
start. Over time, you can build up averages, so that you can
know what is a reasonable expectation, for a certain point in time.
I have a spreadsheet that tracks all the salespeople from
ground zero. This way I am comparing salesperson against
salesperson, quarter by quarter. I know what a first year
average revenue result is and so forth, year by year.
Knowing this is a big help, because I don’t load up new people with
too much pressure. In fact, it gives me the ability to
encourage them. I can tell them that I am not expecting them
to hit the moon straight out the gate. The first year is a giant
learning curve and I want them to do their best and that will be
fine. By taking away the pressure, they can fit into the
team, absorb the culture and begin their training. A players
are expensive, so bosses want results immediately, to justify the
big bucks they are paying them. Fair enough, but the rest of
us need to tread a different path of patience and encouragement, to
gradually mould the new people into performers.
The other thing we need to do is inject ourselves into the mix and
work on developing talent. We cannot leave it all to our
direct reports. Even though we are super busy, we need to
have some regular personal interaction with the new team members
and need to keep close tabs on how they are going. We need to
create the time to coach them. We cannot be there all of the
time, but we have to select precise interventions to help them keep
moving forward. Maybe we can do thirty minutes early
mornings, a couple of times a week, to work with them as a
group.
We also have to scale for their ability to absorb pressure.
Some are robust and others are more delicate flowers.
We need to adjust our time expectations for how long it will
take to get everyone up to speed to handle the pressure to perform.
A players are already forged in the furnace of high
performance, so they are application ready. The balance of
getting cash in the door every month to pay the bills and being
patient with people, is a high wire act that leaders have to learnt
to walk. It is easy to get this wrong and fall to your demise and
see the business go backwards or even down. There is no road
map here either, because every case is different, every group of
individuals is different. You have to play the cards you can
afford and not spend any time wishing to be dealt a better
hand.
The country may be going to hell in a basket, but salespeople are
in high demand. When hiring salespeople people, I am constantly
astonished at the prices other companies will pay for a warm body.
Very challenged E players, with no experience, are getting
offers that make you want to cry. That is the market.
We are all going to be constantly faced with this struggle of
how to develop people we can afford, in an already overheated
hiring market, that will just get worse. The demographics are
not on the leader’s side here, as the lack of young people coming
into sales drives up the price. This will become the sales
era of the C player, with intermittent light showers of B players.
Get ready for it folks.