We have a client that just terminated the sales person after 10 months for non performance. Why did it take so long, you ask, to terminate this person? Well, the client was very interested in making sure that it did everything possible to work with this sales rep in order to enhance their performance. But in retrospect, it should have been about 4 months ago or so that the client fired this person. The reason why it hung on was because the company was waiting and hoping that a different result was going to come by just providing some more time to the sales representative. What's the key lesson here?

It is when you can see that a sales person's not performing and that you can see that they're not making steady progress in improving their sales activity and pipeline and actually closing business. The best rule of thumb is to act quickly, to let that kind of person go so that you can make room for replacing them with somebody who can be more productive. Many sales managers get attached to the individuals who are on their sales team. The process of building positive motivation and a