A good friend of mine is retiring in December, but I won’t be able to make the party. I decided to expand my forging skills and make him a mini-Halligan. This is all forged from one piece. After 40 hours working on the first one, I had to start over. That’s similar to building a world-class sales team.
Sometimes, when you do it yourself, you may get to where you want to go, but it’s a lot of costly time, effort, and money, and you will arrive late. I’ll guarantee you, had I had an expert forging coach working beside me hand in hand, their first one would have been better, quicker, and with less time.
Presidents and CEOs of mid-market companies have their go-to Attorney when the legal %## hits the fan. They have an expert go-to outside Accounting firm when the financials hit the fan. They have outside Commercial Real Estate experts to help with location and tax ramifications. They have external M&A teams when it’s time for that, and they have an outside expert for almost every part of the business except sales growth. They rarely have anyone but the sales VP to grow sales and H/R to hire sales.
No, don’t get me wrong, there are some great VPs, and there are some great H/R pros. The challenge is that the experience is limited to their resume. Most mature VPs in mid-market companies have worked with a few hundred or so salespeople and a dozen or two sales managers. H/R has rarely been in day-to-day sales. And there lies the problem.
Their point of reference usually needs to be wider or deeper to do what is necessary to grow 30-50%. Again, no offense to anyone in H/R or Sales VPs; they are all good people and do their best. However, if they could have fixed your sales growth issues and stopped the sales turnover, they would have already done so. Let’s talk.