Why Your Best Sales Person, May Not Be Your Best Sales Person

I was sitting across from a brand new client. He was telling me about his current situation. I remember it like it was yesterday. They are an up and coming B2B company offering Real Estate Management services. He was explaining how the sales team was structured; he was walking me through the pipeline, he was describing what the buyers were like, who the competition was and more. Like all my clients before and after him, he was providing me with a complete information dump about the company, what's going on, his sales challenges, how their product works and more. My favorite part of new client engagements, this session, was going well, and I was learning a lot.

In this particular case, many of his challenges were similar to other client challenges. There was nothing unique about his situation, and I was pleased to know that the issues he was facing were fixable, and I knew we could make some real progress for his company.

As we kept talking, however, he said something that jumped out at me. It was a big deal. It made me cringe.

He shared the fact that one person on the team was generating 75% of his revenue.

I was blown away. Just one salesperson was responsible for 75% of his companies sales.  He was beholden to one salesperson. Not only was she bringing in 75% of the revenue, but she was also the only one working big deals. She also had the largest pipeline of 10X or more. This account executive was the sales team.

This was not a tenable situation.

After listening to him a bit longer, I shared my thoughts and outlined where I felt we needed to focus and what we needed to do to help him get to the next level.  At the top of the list, I explained, we had to level out the sales team. I asked him to imagine rather than one person bringing in 75% of the revenue, envision each member of the team bringing in 50% of what his top rep was currently doing and the highest-performing rep bringing in 25% less. In other words, one person doing less, but collectively the team doing more.

He looked at me and exclaimed; "That would be great!"

The challenge was clear; we had to elevate the remainder of the team so that they could perform at the same level as this one rep.

Fast forward to today, each member of this team is doing closer to 60% of what the previous #1 sale rep was doing and that sales rep is now doing 40% of what she was doing before. What makes this even more spectacular is the company is about to have their largest quarter ever and are poised to crush their number for the year.

Today, that account executive who was the best salesperson isn't even in the top 50%.  She is in the lower quartile for performance. She is producing, but at nowhere near her early production. She's struggling to keep up and is no longer part of the best sales person discussion.

What happened?

How does your best rep go from being the best to the worst? That's where the real story is.

They don't, they were never your best sales person in the first place. They just looked like they were.

It is not uncommon for me to see this phenomenon in sales organizations.  It seems that in every organization there is a sales person or a handful of sales people (depending on the size of the team) that are sitting atop the sales pecking order, regarded and revered as the best salespeople the company has to offer, and they're not.

How does this happen then?  How do good to average sales reps rise to the top of a sales organization and appear to be the top dog?  The company creates them.

  1. The Expert: This happens when a leader hires a particular "expert" in a field and begin to give them preferential treatment.  They're given better deals, or certain types of deals deemed too "complex" for the rest of the team. This is what happened in this case. The other reps in this company were perceived as too green and therefore leads weren't doled out equally, creating the perception that this sales rep was head and shoulders above the rest. She wasn't.
  2. The Incumbent: You know that guy or girl that's been around for a long time. They've outlasted everyone. When this happens, it's not uncommon for them to amass the best territory, an extensive database of leads and opportunities. The incumbent begins to be your top rep not because they are a better sales person, but because they've amassed the best armament of sales weapons; the best territory, significant pipeline, internal relationships, leads, etc. Their tenure has provided them with a decided advantage which inconspicuously hides their actual abilities.
  3. C Players: Another way average sales reps can be perceived as great is when they are surrounded by average or below average salespeople.  When sales teams have a disproportionate number of C player sales people, it creates an environment where average to slightly above average sales people look better than they are.  The C-players create artificial A-players simply by being so bad. Don't be so quick to assume your top sales guy or gal is good. It might be because everyone else is so bad.

Good reps are worth gold. Too often, however, we bestow the title of "Killer Rep" on our top producers, when in fact they are poor at best.

If you have one or a small handful of sales reps who are substantially outperforming everyone else, it's time to evaluate your team. The odds are, you don't have a few killer reps, but rather a bunch terrible ones, or you've created and unfair selling environment where a selected few are benefitting.

My client's sales have grown substantially since that first meeting. Once we realized his best sales person wasn't his best sales person, everything changed.

Don't fall into the trap that the person delivering the most sales is your best salesperson. Sometimes they are, but sometimes they're not and that could be costing you sales.


Keenan is the founder and CEO of A Sales Guy Inc, Author of Gap Selling and Not Taught. Keenan is an international speaker and the finder of the “ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM”. ...