A sales CV lands on your desk with a short stint in the middle of it. Eleven months at a respected firm, then a move. Or a strong run of years followed by one flat one after the business was acquired. The instinctive reaction is to mark the candidate down and move on to someone with a cleaner record.
Sometimes that instinct is right. Often it is not, and the best sales candidates are scarce enough that rejecting one for the wrong reason is an expensive habit. Very few people have a perfect career record in sales, including the very best. The more useful question is why a good salesperson struggled, because the answer frequently sits in the environment around them rather than in their ability.
The system usually wins
Geary Rummler and Alan Brache, whose work on organisational performance shaped a generation of management thinking, put it in one line in their laws of organisational systems: “If you pit a good performer against a bad system, the system will win almost every time.”
Sales is a clear illustration. A capable salesperson placed in a business with no lead generation, an unclear proposition, a territory carved up badly or a target set without reference to the market will often underperform. Management then tries to fix the person, when the thing that needed fixing was the structure they were asked to sell within. Individual effort can compensate for a flawed process for a while, but rarely for long.
The role that was oversold
One of the most common reasons strong salespeople leave early is that the job they joined was described more generously than it deserved. An attractive on-target earnings figure built on an unrealistic target. A market position that sounded stronger in the interview than it proved to be. A product presented as more differentiated than customers found it.
It is fair to say a good salesperson should qualify an employer as carefully as they qualify a prospect. Most do. But hiring pitches are persuasive, and when the reality turns out to be different, the strongest performers are exactly the people with enough options to move on quickly. The short stint on their CV can reflect good judgement rather than poor performance.
The manager matters more than most hiring plans allow
Gallup has studied engagement across millions of employees over two decades, and estimates that managers account for at least 70 per cent of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. That figure describes the difference between teams rather than the level of engagement in any one of them, but the implication for sales is plain enough. Put the same salesperson under two different managers and you should expect two different results.
The best salespeople tend to respond well to strong leadership, and they welcome coaching that helps them win more. What they tolerate poorly is weak leadership, micro-management that gets in the way of selling, and effort that goes unrecognised. A difficult year under a poor sales manager tells you more about the manager than about the salesperson.
When the company changes around them
Acquisitions, restructures and changes of strategy can alter what a salesperson sells, who they sell to and how they are expected to sell, sometimes overnight. A change of culture can matter just as much. Someone who was over-achieving before the change can find their performance dips, or that they no longer believe in what they are selling, and belief carries a great deal of weight in a sales conversation.
A dip in results that coincides with a change of ownership is worth exploring properly before it is held against a candidate.
What this means when you are hiring
There are two practical consequences, and both work in your favour.
The first is in how you read candidates. When a sales record has a gap, a short tenure or a weak year, ask what surrounded the result. What was the target and how was it set? Who was their manager? What changed in the business? Where did the pipeline come from? Strong candidates can usually explain the context behind their numbers with some precision, and the explanation often reveals more about their judgement than an unbroken record would. You may find that a candidate others have passed over is precisely the person you want.
The second is in how you set up your own hire to succeed. Describe the role honestly, including the parts that are hard. Set a target that reflects the market. Make sure the person managing them can lead a salesperson as well as sell. Give them the support the role genuinely requires. The best candidates will test all of this during the process, and a business that can answer those questions well is far more likely to attract them and keep them.
Failing to be honest about how a role is really done is one of the ten traps in our free guide, The Ten Most Common Sales Hiring Mistakes.
Kingman Lennox assesses sales candidates on the conditions behind their results as well as the results themselves, and briefs them honestly on the role they are being asked to take on. You can read more about how we work and about our twelve-month guarantee, or arrange a discovery call to talk through a sales appointment you are planning.
