284 Failing Salespeople

<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" xml:lang="EN-US">Are you failing in sales yourself or do you have sales staff reporting to you who are not making their numbers?  Sales is a brutal, metrics based activity where there are no hiding places or at least none that can be sustained.  Eventually, the numbers show if you are making it or you are not.  What happens then?  In the West, the usual next step is you are fired and a replacement is found.  Japan is a bit different.  The social and legal bias is against firing people for poor performance.  In the case of large companies, the management is expected to move that failing salesperson into another job, where they can do better.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" xml:lang="EN-US">Smaller companies don't have that same pressure, because the courts know that survival can be impaired by underperformers.  The herd must unite together to survive, even if it means releasing one of their number.  Nevertheless, internally, the other members of the team expect that the failing salesperson be given some sort of vague chance to right their ship of sales.  They don’t like seeing heads lopped off, because they always feel that “but for the grace of God, there go I”.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" xml:lang="EN-US">Whether it is you who are failing or one of your staff, what should you do?  The issue usually lies with the work style of that person.  What they are doing today is the product of what they have been doing for a long time and so they expect that to work.  The issue often arises that when you shift companies or even industries, what worked before is no longer working.  As human beings we are sometimes so programed to keep repeating what we know and what we think will work, that we become blind to reality.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" xml:lang="EN-US">In smaller companies and in <em>gaishikei</em>, foreign multinationals, the whole age and stage hierarchy gets mixed up as well.  Suddenly you find your boss is