Please come fire all my salespeople!

With the start of the fall season, many new sales and business development advisory opportunities seem to be crossing my desk. This year, however, they seem to share a pattern: the CEO or VP Sales is “frustrated” with their sales teams (expletives deleted) and would I please come fire them all. They complain that their people “just don’t have it in them” to constantly cold call and keep a high rate of activity which of course will make everyone successful forever. “If only they’d do it my way!” I hear. 

Everyone wants to hire that nearly-deranged person who lives for cold calling and rips through a call list just for the adrenaline rush. But even if you can find candidates with the right mix of experience, the good ones are prohibitively expensive and can be a management hassle. In my experience, someone who gets off to cold calling 100 times a day is usually deficit in other areas and can’t do much else.  And they churn quickly.

Fine! you say. That’s what you want. But think about who your prospects are. If they are more than just meat for a boiler-room phone center, I suggest that you look at the way you currently go to market.

The days of picking up the phone and convincing a stranger to spend large sums of money with you are simply dead. The environment has changed. What buyer in their right mind (especially in IT) actually picks up random phone calls these days? Caller ID and email filters mean never having to speak to a salesperson. 

Update your sales strategy and move your company into the age of collaborative new business acquisition. Utilize the amazing new sales and web 2.0 tools and hire awesome service-oriented sales talent – not phone weasels. This takes a new set of skills, new hiring approach, management style, which of course, starts at the top. 

Next (related) post: “Generation Y Joins the Sales Team” (or “Sally Get Your Gun”)