We sell - What?

Do you remember Donald Rumsfeld's "you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want"? Please remember that saying when you're hiring sales reps. My point - don't hire sales reps for things you want to sell, hire reps for things you actually do sell. More than once, I've been interviewed for sales positions and been told that the company wants to go after "Fortune 500" size clients and we have this and that product and/or capability. However, after doing a little DD, it became apparent that there was no way either of these companies had the capabilities required for those size clients.

The two firms had different reasons for their actions and so in the interest of clarity, I'll explain them.

The first was a recently-acquired subsidiary of a huge corporation and, naturally, the bug was placed in someone's ear that cross-selling was a good thing and ought to be pursued. As it turns out, the subsidiary that was going to hire me was once a company that specialized in small business, but had been bought by a larger firm and in turn the two of them were both swallowed by a huge multi-national. Since the mother ship had always dealt with firms it's own size, they just naturally assumed that it's new acquisitions would be able to do the same. Unfortunately all the employees of this subsidiary, their training, mindset, and more importantly their systems were all geared for small clients. It's not that they were never going to get there but they needed to do a lot of infrastructure work and employee training in order to do it. They did, in fact, do some elephant-hunting in conjunction with their larger brethren for a while and failed miserably. Cross-selling has been tabled for now.

The second firm was moving into a different facet of it's business with a different client base and didn't do enough research to find out product differences that were industry standard among it's new prospects. When you are a new player in an industry and show that you don't really know what every one else is doing, or why, or how the client is affected, it makes the whole sales process a horrible sight. Worse, they didn't know what they didn't know and so the new reps were led to believe that the company had it's act together. When the skin was peeled back on procedures and processes, it was "WTF?",

Now maybe you're just saying that these are isolated instances. I don't think so; there is much anecdotal information about firms entering markets and failing miserably because they were unprepared to handle the needs of that market.

Hiring a rep to sell to clients you have no business going after does a disservice to the rep, damage to their reputation and to the credibility to your firm. Yes, there are always new markets we would like to get into but before you hire someone to crack them, make sure you do your homework to make sure you have the systems and deliverables to make your foray a success. If you do hire a rep that's knowledgeable in a market you want to get into and want them to help you do it, make sure to adjust their sales quota until you are ready to deliver the goods.