Episode #284: Failing Salespeople

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.

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”.

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.

In smaller companies and in gaishikei, foreign multinationals, the whole age and stage hierarchy gets mixed up as well. Suddenly you find your boss is younger than you or a woman or both! For older men, this requires a level of flexibility that they have never had to find in their previous work life. If the old dogs can’t learn some new tricks, the gaishikeibosses will be quick to disappear them.

Welcome Back Sales is tough and requires constant re-invention. We have to develop higher levels of self awareness and understand that what we think is correct may not fit this situation and therefore need to find a new truth that works for us. Smaller companies don’t have other spots to move failing salespeople around to, so usually it is one last chance or imminent departure.

In the current market, where it is very hard to hire salespeople, especially English speaking salespeople, then a degree of patience is required on the boss’s part. Even if this person is not performing well enough, they are knowledgeable about the products and the clients and so have a base from which to improve. The simple solution is to just fire them. However, once the sale’s problem child has been fired, we have the difficulty of finding a replacement at all or finding one who is actually better than the last. In a tight market, you tend to take what you can get and hope you can train them to be better. This is great in theory and totally logical. Do you actually have the means of doing that though? Who will train them? What amount of onboard training will they get. In small firms everything is super lean so the training component tends to be Spartan.

If there are age and gender issues confronting them, then the salesperson has to realise they have to suck it up and get used to this brave new world of work, which is not how it was back in the day of their long departed youth. So what. They either have to learn how to fit it or they will be out on their ear. From the boss’s side, at least giving people a chance to come back from the precipice fits in well with social values in Japan and the rest of the team will prefer that to casting them out into oblivion. The retention of your other performing team members is a key job of the boss in this era of multiple jobs for everyone looking for work in Japan. People observe how you handle poor performance very minutely and forensically.

No easy answers anymore, to the poor performance conundrum in Japan. The bad news is that this isn’t going to ever improve, so we all have to navigate our way around these issues in more creative ways than before. The failing salesperson has to reinvent themselves and we bosses have to do the same. The market punishes those who are not able to move with the times and find the flexibility needed to thrive and survive.