The End of the Line

In his many years as North American sales manager at Ceram Tec, a technical ceramics firm in Mansfield, MA, Walt Dollman has had to terminate a few sales salespeople. “I’ve had to do it a few times too many,” he explains. But guess what? He’s gotten good at it.

That’s because Dollman goes out of his way to give the salespeople every chance to improve their situation and fires them only when they’ve demonstrated an inability or unwillingness to improve. “No one is let go without a chance to improve, for anything short of stealing,” he says.

Dollman succeeds because he follows company guidelines to a tee. They start with discussions about an employee’s status whenever the employee is in trouble. “We discuss the goals to be met, and then we offer training in areas of weakness,” he says. “If that fails, we go into a written plan with dates attached to it.”

Dollman’s company thus establishes guidelines for the employee to meet and follows up by keeping an accurate record of them. “Map out the expectations and make them measurable rather than subjective,” Dollman says.

The salesperson may have failed in areas such as generating new accounts or profitable sales dollars. Or the salesperson may have expressed a desire not to travel, which is “the toughest part of the job,” Dollman says. In all these cases, Dollman establishes objectives for the salesperson to meet – everything from the number of new accounts to the amount of increased revenue to the frequency of visits to customers. “You need to set up a structure for what the objectives of employment are,” he says.

Only when the salesperson fails to meet these objectives in a specified amount of time will Dollman resort to termination. “The salesperson comes in and meets with me, with the personnel manager as a witness,” he says. “We will have mapped out a severance package that’s within company guidelines prior to the meeting. It’s all ready.”

The goal of the termination meeting, he says, “is to be very brief and concentrate on the fact that it’s the best for all concerned. The idea is to get it over with and move on. Say it truthfully, bluntly and as kindly as possible.”

When Dollman says brief, he means brief. “If a severance meeting takes longer than five minutes, the manager has failed somewhere,” he asserts.

Though Dollman may be quick at firing a salesperson, he only does it as a last resort because he knows it’s hard on the company as well as the employee. “You already invested in the person and the investment is thrown away when you let someone go,” he says. “Sometimes it’s wise to invest more, but you reach a point where the investment isn’t a good one.”

Edward Marohn, director of retail sales for General Tire in Charlotte, NC, says salespeople are always in danger of termination because of the demands of the job. “Sales is a very visible job with quotas and the responsibility for managing a customer base,” he says. “There’s a laundry list of skills that has to be performed. You can separate the performers from the nonperformers.”

Like Dollman, Marohn goes out of his way to turn nonperformers into performers. He establishes goals and performance standards and encourages the salespeople to meet them. He counsels the salespeople in an effort to help them improve. Only when that fails will he consider termination, but first he puts the salespeople on probation with specific assignments. “If they fail to meet them, they don’t care to be employed,” he concludes. “Then termination is the only course left.”

Bob DeGroot, president of Sales Training International, who trains managers on handling termination situations, says “The firing process begins with hiring.” By this he means that sales managers should know exactly what they expect from salespeople before they start, and if salespeople fail to meet the standards, they could be dismissed. But not, of course, without lots of effort on the part of managers to improve their situations. DeGroot says managers with coaching skills can best help their salespeople improve. Managers can coach their salespeople by closely observing the way they work, making recommendations about how they can improve and encouraging them to write out plans of action to improve their skills. Next, the manager evaluates the salesperson’s progress. “The manager sets standards on each activity so sales knows day to day how they’re performing,” he says.

If sales are slipping, “Managers must do the coaching. They must hold a coaching meeting to get the salesperson to admit there’s a problem and see how it’s impacting the company. Then they must come up with a plan about how to fix it, within a time limit.”

During this process, the manager lets salespeople know that if they don’t follow the plan it is tantamount to turning in their resignation. “Let the salespeople terminate themselves,” is the way DeGroot describes it.

The tactics DeGroot teaches and Dollman and Marohn follow are the best for handling termination situations. No one likes to fire a salesperson. When it has to be done, it has to be done – but only after a salesperson has had every chance to improve and managers have done everything they can to help turn around a failing situation.