Avoid Recruiting Sales Staff in Hurry.

In sales, the pressure to achieve sales targets is a constant. Sales professionals live with this "stark reality" day in and day out.

To maximize sales and corner more/sustain market share, companies hire sales staff to increase the width and depth of its sales and distribution.

In a rush to increase footprint of it's products/services, organizations recruit, select and induct employees to assign territories to them for appointing channel partners to increase sales and distribution.

When a sales employee leaves an organisation for whatever reasons, then organisation need to fill replacement at the earliest so that the sales territory of ex employee doesn't suffer and no sales loss happen in vacant territory.

In this rush to appoint people, lots of "not so good" hiring decisions are made by HR and/or Sales Managers.

These decisions to hire people to just achieve sales goals backfire in the long run.

A bad hire in sales organization can cost company heavily in the long run in the following ways:

1. Entry of Wrong Channel Partners in the Distribution Chain:

A bad hire with less capabilities and less job competence may appoint wrong type of channel partners just to achieve sales targets. 

Appointment of wrong (read financially weak, with less experience in channel business or fresh inexperienced channel partners etc) results into higher turnover of channel partners as soon these wrong partners sever their business relationship with organization after suffering huge losses due to the working style and work practices of such bad hires.

These fast replacement of channel partners in territories of bad hire bring bad reputation to organizations that in turn start facing challenges in finding Right and Good channel partner's in such areas as no good channel partners want to associate themselves with organizations where channel partners leave early.

Net result: Such areas remain vacant for long periods thus costing organization heavily in terms of sales loss and reputation (whatever is left of it) loss.

2. A Bad Apple Brings with it Foul Air:

Bad hires bring with them a lot of mental baggage in terms of their unethical and unprofessional work habits. 

These hastily recruited sales personnel make false promises to their customers just to lure them into buying company products/services. 

Because such people make such promises without the knowledge of their seniors and organization, so these promises to customers are not fulfilled which leaves a bad taste in the customer psyche about organization and its products/services. This loss of customer faith is immeasurable financially in the short as well as long term.

3. Introduction of a Bad Work Discipline:

Bad hires bring with them habit of indiscipline of reporting late on their duties and leaving market early, and not making required number of sales calls and productive calls on daily basis.

This indiscipline soon starts rubbing on the psyche of other disciplined sales team members, who too start adopting some of unproductive habits of these bad hires. This leads to productivity loss in sales organization and it is no brainer to guess how this productivity loss impacts all other departments in organization in terms of productivity and business loss.

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4. Focus on Petty/unimportant issues:

Hires with bad work practices put a lot of pressure on the back end office support staffs who have to continuously follow up with them on sending daily/weekly reports, or submitting financial claims of channel partners, scheme details of customers Sales etc.

Back end Sales support staff have to literally chase them to induce them on sending work and sales and customer related reports. This leads to loss of productivity in sales support function as they waste a lot of time keeping a tracking such team members.

This "busy ness" of sales support with such unproductive sales staff means they have less time at their disposal to address the issues of channel partners and other issues of sales employees. 

This loss of productivity at back end office impacts customer and employee service negatively which may cost company dear in terms of loss of good and productive employees and channel partners.

5. Faster Hiring Leads to Fast Firing leading to Increased cost of selling:

Bad hires due to their strengths in "unproductive work practices" and not so empowering habits are soon exposed in the system as the harmful results of their working start manifesting left, right and center in the sales organization. 

This "discovery" of their poor and harmful performance leads to their exits from the organization. Their exits burden in a more costly ways to the organization in terms of costs incurred by organization in recruitment, selection, induction the employees who replace them.

Add to it the loss of sales and distribution in the areas which they used to manage, till the vacancy is filled, and you can only guess as to huge cost to the organization in the long run.

                                        Image: newconfig. com

6. Rise in Avoidable Issues/Customer Challenges:

Bad hires have a good thing going about them. They are exposed soon in the system with the fall in their sales numbers, Rise in customer issues and higher turnover of channel partners in their areas of operations.

Counseling, training interventions are "too soft" to break into the thick mental walls of their deeply ingrained work habits and work practices.

So soon they are asked to leave the organization, which means new employee has to be recruited, selected and inducted. If in a rush a bad hiring decision is made again by organization staff then that bad hire will have to be replaced again very soon. 

This higher employee turnover earns the organization a bad reputation and soon not even "average employee" wants to associate with such organizations notorious for "changing" their employee very fast.

Loss in employer value proposition costs organizations immensely as then they have to make do with below average employees who, "as we have detailed in this post" only add to financial and reputational burden of the organizations.

Did I miss any other way such Bad Onions make kitchen stink?

Pls share your thoughts in comments section.

Thanks,

MM