The hire that was not the problem

Revenue goes flat. The board asks what is being done about it. Somebody proposes a hire, because a hire is a visible, fundable, defensible answer to that question, and within a quarter there is a new business development manager in the seat.

Six months later revenue is roughly where it was. The manager is under-performing, or so the story goes. They leave or are managed out, and the cycle starts again with a better brief and a higher salary.

I have watched this run three times in the same business. It is worth being precise about why it happens, because the usual explanation is wrong.

The hire is a bet that the constraint is capacity

Hiring a salesperson is not a neutral act. It is a specific claim about the business: that there is more demand than the current team can work, and adding hands will convert it.

Sometimes that is true. When it is, the hire works quickly and obviously, because you were leaving money on the table and now you are not.

The rest of the time the constraint is somewhere else. The proposition is no longer distinctive, so deals stall in the middle. Nobody has defined what a qualified opportunity is, so the pipeline is full of things that were never going to close. Pricing has drifted below the cost of serving the customer, so winning more of it makes the problem worse.

None of those are fixed by another person. A new salesperson lands in the same system, produces the same result more expensively, and gets blamed for it.

The tell is that effort and outcome have come apart

There is a straightforward test. Look at activity over the last two years, and look at revenue over the same period.

If activity is up and revenue is flat, the constraint is not capacity. More activity is producing less. Adding a person adds activity, which is the thing that has already stopped working.

That is an uncomfortable finding because it does not have a fundable answer. There is no obvious purchase order for "our proposition is no longer distinctive". So the hire gets made anyway, and the discomfort is deferred by six months at a cost of somewhere between sixty and a hundred and twenty thousand pounds.

What to do about it before you write the job description

Three questions, in this order.

1. Of the last twenty deals you lost, how many were lost to a competitor, and how many to no decision? A business losing to no decision has a proposition problem. A business losing to competitors has a positioning or pricing problem. They need different fixes and neither is a hire. 2. What is your definition of a qualified opportunity, and can two people in your team state it the same way? If not, your pipeline is a list rather than a forecast. 3. What does your best salesperson do that the others do not? If nobody has written it down, hiring more people just increases the number of people improvising.

If those three come back clean, hire. You genuinely have a capacity problem and you should fix it.

If they do not, the money is better spent finding out why, and you will spend a fraction of it.

> The most expensive thing about the wrong hire is not the salary. It is the six months where everyone believes the problem is being addressed.

The version nobody wants to hear

Occasionally the honest answer is that the person who should be doing this work is already in the building, and is being prevented from doing it by how the function is run. That conclusion makes nobody happy and it is right more often than it is comfortable.