When to Fire Salespeople (and When to Fire Them Up)

Danita Bye

To Terminate or Germinate, That Is the Question

Good managers don’t like to terminate salespeople (and I mean “terminate” in the sense of “hand out a pink slip,” not the Arnold Schwarzenegger kind). Those who do enjoy giving salespeople the heave-ho aren’t good managers. But though it’s distasteful to fire a fellow human being from his or her job, it’s necessary. Just ask a Sequoia tree, which knows all about fire (of the red-and-yellow kind, not the pink-and-black kind, though it has all sorts of relevance for us).

Lighting the Way to a Strong Sales Force

The Sequoia, or Coastal Redwood, in conjunction with Nature — an expert on turning misfortune to advantage — has made the fires that sometimes ravage its habitat a necessary part of life. At the fragile beginning of a Sequoia’s life, it uses fire to release its seed from an olive-sized pine cone. In fact, it requires it. Once the seed is free of its mothership, it needs a bare patch of ground to germinate. Fire makes that possible by burning away the brush. As the seed becomes a seedling, it needs sunlight to grow to its potential of over three hundred feet. Again, fire is indispensable, because it burns away old, dead wood that hides the sun.

The parallels are pretty obvious for business: Your growing salespeople are your good salespeople. Your old, dead wood and ground-obscuring brush are the salespeople who are done growing, the ones who just get in the way of those who aren’t. So, you fire them to clear them away, strengthening your sales force in the process.

And that begs two questions: Who is who and how do I fire without getting burned? The Sequoia has the answer to the second question. John Condry can handle the first.

Firing the Uncoachable – a Last Resort That Puts Good Salespeople First

John Condry, of Cornerstones Management, developed the Hand-You’re-Dealt classification system to help managers and CEOs determine who’s a candidate for pruning, who needs a little help, and who just needs you to stay out of their way.

Condry divides salespeople into four quadrants:

Terminate or transfer
Train and provide personal goal development
Retain and provide growth opportunities
Maintain and monitor performance

These quadrants are fairly self-explanatory, but it’s worth noting that only the “terminate or transfer” quadrant is the last word – salespeople who inhabit the others can be moved around, in a positive direction by a good coach and in a negative one with the help of a poor coach (or without any outside help at all).

So, for example, let’s say we’re dealing with Fred, who’s new and, frankly, scared. Fred’s very green, but he seems to respond well to criticism and coaching. That puts him in the second quadrant. His manager will do everything in her power to move him to quadrants three and four, but if she can’t budge him from the second quadrant, time will put him in the first – and his manager will regrettably have to put him out to pasture.

Fast forward to a year later: Poor Fred just isn’t germinating, and efforts to fire him up have only burned him down to a cynical, excuse-making liability for the whole sales team. How does his manager, a very kind woman named Frederica, give him his walking papers without succumbing to cynicism, pessimism, and all the other bad –isms, herself?

When a mature Sequoia is faced with the fire that made its growth possible in the first place, it allows the flames to char its two-foot-thick bark into a baked heat shield. When Frederica is forced to fire Fred, her heat shield is not cynicism but a sense of duty to those members of her sales team who need the sunlight of a strong sales culture to continue thriving. She doesn’t get a kick out of kicking Fred out, but she wants those in her shadow to reach their full heights. And besides being a kind – and necessary – sacrifice for her team’s health; Fred’s firing frees him to find a field where he can bear fruit.

Bio: Danita Bye

Nationally recognized sales management and leadership expert Danita Bye has built her reputation on building and inspiring intentional, no excuse, high-performance sales teams that deliver bottom line results. With her unique Fortune-100 turned-entrepreneur perspective, Danita helps CEOs and company presidents take their national and international businesses to the next level. Her excuse-free approach to sales management, combined with her leadership acumen, enables sales staff and sales management to increase sales, boost profitability and create predictable revenue streams, all while reducing sales costs.

As a 10-year veteran of the Xerox Corporation, Danita consistently achieved award winning sales performance before leaving Xerox to become an equity partner and national sales manager for Minneapolis-based Micro-Tech Hearing Instruments, where she increased annual revenues from $300,000 to $10 million in just seven years. Danita has authored articles in Upsize Magazine, The Hearing Review, the Star Tribune, and Business Journal, where she was recently honored as one of the its Top 25 Women to Watch. Danita also featured as a guest on “The Ruthless Entrepreneur television show” which will begin airing on Oxogen Network in 2010. Her new book, Sales Management in the No Excuse Zone, is due for release in 2010.

Danita can be contacted at Danita@SalesGrowthSpecialists.com or 612-267-3320