Sales Leader’s Q&A: When to terminate?

by Dave Kahle

Question:

Our business has been struggling for the last year or so. Several of my salespeople are just not producing.  I’m not sure I can continue to work with them.  When do I decide to terminate their employment?

Answer:

Wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t have to ask this question? In an ideal world, everyone would succeed, and our biggest problem would be how to acknowledge the real heroes among a group of deserving colleagues.

But it is not an ideal world, and every sales manager is, at some point, faced with this decision.  At what point do you decide to fire them?

This is a very personal decision embedded with emotional ramifications.  There are all sorts of individual mitigating factors that influence the answer to this question.  I just came from one of my clients, for example, where one of the non-performing salespeople has been with the company for over 10 years, and was hired by the company’s president.

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Clearly, that presents a different set of factors than the new hire who just isn’t getting it.

While I can not sort out all of those individual issues for you, I can offer some over-all guidelines.

Profitable?

First, I’m going to assume that the salesperson is costing the company money; that the person is not profitable.  This is an important assumption because I think different rules apply if the person is profitable.  I’m using profitable here in the sense that I describe in Kahle’s Kalculation.  If you haven’t become familiar with that, retrieve the free download for “How to Kreate Kahle’s Kalculation.”  Depending on the type of business and the dynamics... READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE.