Every owner who has struggled with sales has had this thought: *I just need to find a real closer.*
Sometimes that is true. Usually it is not. I have walked into companies on their fourth salesperson in three years, and the pattern is always the same — four different people, one broken system, four identical outcomes. At that point the variable is not the people.
Run these six checks before you make another hire.
1. Is the process written down?
Not in your head. Written. What happens between a lead arriving and money landing? Who does what, when, and what has to be true to move forward?
If you cannot hand a new rep a document that describes the sale, you are not hiring a salesperson — you are hiring someone to invent your sales process while under quota pressure. Almost nobody can do that.
2. Is "qualified" defined?
If every warm body counts as an opportunity, your team will spend most of their time on people who were never going to buy. Define the bar: what need, what budget range, what timeline, what authority. Then hold the line.
The most common finding when I audit a struggling team is that half of pipeline activity is aimed at non-buyers. That looks like a motivation problem. It is a definition problem.
3. Is there a contact cadence?
Most deals are not lost to competitors. They are lost to silence. A defined follow-up cadence — how many touches, over how many days, across which channels — routinely recovers a meaningful share of deals the team had written off.
If your answer to "how many times do we follow up?" is "until it feels awkward," that is not a cadence.
4. Do they have materials that do work?
A rep talking off the top of their head is re-inventing the pitch on every call. Give them a one-page capability summary, a pricing framework, three relevant proof points, and answers to the five objections you hear every week.
This is not corporate polish. It is removing the improvisation tax from every conversation.
5. Is anyone coaching the actual selling?
Reviewing numbers is not coaching. Coaching is sitting in on calls, listening to how discovery is run, and correcting specific behavior. A weekly pipeline review that only asks "what''s the status" trains people to narrate rather than sell.
6. Does the comp plan pay for what you actually want?
Comp is the loudest instruction you give. If you pay the same on every deal, you get whatever deals are easiest — usually your lowest-margin work. If you want margin, pay on margin. If you want new logos, pay more for new logos than renewals.
People do not do what you say. They do what you pay.
The order of operations
Fix in this sequence, because each step makes the next one possible:
- Write the process
- Define qualification and enforce it in the CRM
- Set the cadence
- Build the materials
- Install weekly coaching
- Then — and only then — evaluate the people
After that sequence, the reps who are genuinely wrong for the role become obvious fast, and so do the ones who were being failed by the system. Both of those are useful to know, and neither is knowable before the system exists.
What the good version looks like
A new hire ramps in weeks instead of quarters. The forecast is believable. Losses have reasons. Performance differences between reps are visible and coachable rather than mysterious.
That is a sales system. It outlives any individual on the team, which is exactly the point.