Your sales plan, and your personal success, is based on having your sales team fully staffed and 100% productive. But what if it isn’t? Let’s look at the cost of just one open territory.
Assume a $1.2M quota. You’d think that every month the position is unfilled it costs you $100,000. That’s not telling the whole story. The simple math assumes that the new hire is immediately at 100% productivity from the day they start. A lovely thought, but not even close to reality. Sales training experts project that it takes a new rep 90 days, in addition to your normal sales cycle, to close new business. Add to that the time it takes to find the right person to hire.
A more likely scenario:
- Source, engage, interview, hire, and start. 90 days. Revenue lost: $300,000.
- Onboarding and assimilation. 90 days. Revenue lost: $300,000.
- Ramp through the sales cycle. Six months. Revenue lost: $600,000.
Total revenue lost: $1,200,000. An entire year’s worth of quota.
This is, hopefully, a worst-case scenario. Your new rep may land some small deals along the way. In the case of a backfill, there may be business left on the table. But the reality is that good sales execs don’t leave until they’ve closed out their big deals, and poor performers don’t really have much pipeline to leave behind.
Every single week that territory is open costs you $25,000 in lost revenue. Ka-ching, ka-ching. It adds up fast.
A plan to fill the open
You need a plan to fill your opens as quickly as possible. Four things you can do to save time and get your revenue back on target:
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Scrap the old-style job descriptions. Create a candidate-centered value proposition that clearly defines the kind of person who’s proven successful for your team. You want to attract a producer, not a seat-filler.
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Hire a book of business. Look for someone with established relationships that can be leveraged going forward.
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Go after them. Skip the post-and-pray. You don’t need dozens of iffy ad responses to weed through. You need a handful of qualified, hireable candidates with documented accomplishments who can hit the ground running.
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Hire a professional headhunter to get the job done faster and more efficiently, and get your revenue back on track quickly.
Time is money: both your wasted time going through a long and unfulfilling hiring process, and the time wasted when the open territory isn’t covered. And the ultimate waste of time, settling for the wrong person.