What Is The TRUE Cost Of A Wrong Hire?

Have you ever thought about what the cost is to hire a mediocre or bad salesperson in 2020?

I want to touch on that today. I've found that many managers underestimate what a bad sales hire costs.

Here's a common scenario, you might have seen it happen.

You hire somebody. They're not so great. They last a year, and then you let them go. The question is, over that year, what did it cost? Here's some of the elements that I want you to think about as you analyze this.

Of course, the obvious one is salary. If you pay them a salary, that's the easy number to come up with. Of course, benefits aren’t too hard to get your head around. But then if you look at things like:

• Was there travel?
• Was there a car allowance?
• How about training time?
• How about the manager's time? (Like your time, if you spent with the new person, 10, 20% of your time) what's that worth?

Then when you get to the territory under-performs.

• It could be you give a salesperson leads, and they don't close them, and a good salesperson could have.
• Or they just don't grow the territory like they should.
• Or they lose an account because they're kind of a bonehead, and now you take a client, a customer you've had, and they go away.

I've done this over so many years, and I've had managers in the room to go through this formula, and the average number is between $500,000 and $1,000,000. Most people who think, initially, "Well, it must have cost me 50, 60, 80 grand." Once they go through this kind of math, it's a whole different thing.

I want you to go through, and just do some rough numbers and see. What would the wrong hire cost you if they stuck around for a year? Then, of course on top of that to help fix it, (here's my big suggestion), make sure you're hiring process is buttoned down, that you're doing testing. That you're role playing. That you're doing some strong reference checks.

You're really treating it as a million dollar decision.

Once you do that, you just find yourself doing the right stuff along the way. So whatever number you come up, write it on an index card, post it on your wall. And next time you're in recruiting mode, and you're thinking of getting a little lazy and skipping a step, this will be your reminder.

Here are some More of my recent Articles:

Are You A Traditional Salesperson, Or A Contrarian

Are You Allowing Stereotypical Salespeople in 2019?

Improve Your Sales Team in 2019 With The "Lifeboat Exercise"

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