Rick Page - Make Winning a Habit стр 11.

Its not what you pay a man, but what he costs you that counts.

Will Rogers

also there are huge non-monetary costs that have an impact on the manager.

One thing is sure: Whatever the gap is between what you hire and what you need, the manager pays for in the long run. The costs incurred from hiring mistakes include lost productivity, as well as lost time for the manager and the entire sales teamnot only lost sales from the poor production of that one salesperson, but also lost managers time that was taken away from other people who could have benefited from good coachingnot to mention other losses such as angry customers, employee morale, and even missed opportunities.

Not having a reason not to hire someone is not a reason to hire them.

Whatever the gap is between what you hire and what you need, the manager pays for in the long run. If your new hire is not exceptional, they are not acceptable.

Here is an example based on a salesperson with a $1.5 million quota:

our accounting practices required us to take a writeoff or write a check for this amount every time an employee went out the door, this would stop.

In addition to money, the other costs of a bad hire include

Lost productivity.

Time and stress.

Error correction.

Angry customers.

Employee morale.

Wasted support resources.

Missed opportunities.

Management reputation.

However, a very successful rep could produce quota for 10 years or more. How much time would you spend on a prospect that size? Why would you spend less time on a rep?

The next best thing is to figure out how much your real costs are so that you can figure out where your time is best spent. It's not only pay me now or pay me laterpaying me later is several multiples of the time invested now.

Recruiting and interviewing are two of the most valuable investments sales managers can make of their time. But it has to be proactive, and it has to be in advance of an open territory or you will end up settling for someone who is adequate rather than being able to wait for somebody who is exceptional.

A colleague of ours, Rob Jeppsen, tells a story of when he was the CEO of a young technology company:

You may only get one good shot at a particular client, and the wrong rep can blow this shot. You could lose the opportunity to do business with the client for yearsif ever.

Our firm needed to hire two reps. I had the board putting all kinds of pressure on me to fill the territories ASAP. As important as these territories were to the company, we were unwilling to pay market rates.

I was told that 'good would be good enough. As a result, I hired the best two guys I could find for the right price.

As it turned out, the two I chose were not people I would have hired if I had the option of waiting.These guys could not speak the language of our customers and drove away far more customers than they attracted.

As they struggled to succeed, not only did they cause us to lose real opportunities, [but] they [also] became negative energy sources, complaining about all of the things that were making it impossible for them to sell. This caused significant damage as other employees joined sides of management or salespeople.

Ultimately, good was not good enough, and it took us nearly 18 months to fully recover.

Another way to be proactive and get ahead of the curve is to nurture your networktake care of your people and keep in contact with the salespeople who have been successful for you in the past. When you get your next sales management job, those people could be your pool. I know a lot of sales managers who have put themselves out of business because they not only didnt nurture the network, they burned bridges.

Another source is to cultivate professional organizations. That dead time during trade shows and conferences can be well spent getting to know the competitive salespeople who always assemble there.

A very successful rep could produce quota for 10 years or more. How much would you spend on a prospect that size?

the grass is greener for a reason; maybe its the stuff they are spreading around over there. Good people can come back if you keep the door open.

Most managers, in their interviewing process, consider only two dimensionsperformance and personality. If this is as deep as you look, youre not going deep enough.

There are a number of reasons salespeople fail and one of the biggest ones isnt a lack of confidence or commitment. Its character. And most interviewers fail to ask enough questions in this area.

In our management training course, we teach people how to drill down to character issues in addition to performance. We teach them to ask questions they wouldnt normally ask otherwise.