Why are salespeople inefficient?
Sometimes, it feels like salespeople are completely useless and don't make any effort... Why is that?
4/6/20264 min read
Why In-House Sales Teams Underperform
I've worked as a Business Developer at three different startups as a full-time employee. During that time, I learned how to prospect through cold calling, cold emailing, multichannel outreach, and how to manage accounts.
Over time, I started noticing the same recurring pattern everywhere, to the point where it began to feel almost universal: most employees don't actually work that hard, and the workplace tends to develop a strange atmosphere that's part friendly, part toxic.
Yet hiring an in-house salesperson is generally much more expensive than hiring a freelancer. So why do so many employees seem to have so little incentive to actually work?
If your B2B salespeople are underperforming, there's often a structural problem within the company.
Here's the reason: career progression depends much more on internal politics than on the actual work being done.
Many B2B salespeople seem to spend 95% of their mental energy navigating office politics: trying to appear competent, and sometimes even making sure they're on the side of those doing the bullying rather than the person being bullied.
Managers and senior executives are often the best at playing this political game. In fact, they're usually the people who have managed to integrate themselves into the senior leadership circle, even when they may be completely incompetent when it comes to actually doing the job.
The remaining 5% of their mental energy goes towards real work. And that's what sales underperformance looks like in practice.
Bad Hiring Decisions
Let's go back to where it all starts.
Imagine a company founded by a group of people who are extremely good at technology but have absolutely no sales or marketing skills.
Alternatively, imagine a group of founders whose main strength is having an extensive professional network, which has allowed them to raise significant funding for a B2B project.
But how do you hire the right Head of Sales or Chief Marketing Officer when you don't actually know anything about sales or marketing yourself?
This simple fact explains why so many hiring decisions end up being major failures, without the founders necessarily realizing it.
Since they lack the relevant expertise, they can't properly benchmark candidates or distinguish between good and bad sales performance.
You can also read more here about [why so many B2B prospecting campaigns fail within the first three months].
Hiring decisions therefore end up being based on office politics: whether you get along with the person on a daily basis, whether they seem competent, and whether you have a generally positive impression of them.
The Domino Effect Within Sales Teams
This way of thinking then creates a domino effect throughout the entire company.
The Head of Sales or Marketing will eventually be responsible for hiring the rest of the team. And since they're incompetent themselves, they'll tend to hire other incompetent people.
That's how a company becomes trapped in long-term underperformance: the first hiring decision was wrong, and every subsequent one follows the same pattern.
You end up with an entire sales team full of underperformers, essentially being paid to do very little, when the whole team could potentially be replaced by a single competent salesperson who would often do a much better job.
And if, by accident, a genuinely good salesperson joins the team, they'll need to be extremely careful. If they challenge the competence of senior colleagues or their manager, they could quickly find themselves pushed out.
In other words, in this type of environment, actually performing well can become politically dangerous.
For an incompetent employee, it's the perfect environment: all you need to do is get along with everyone and, quite often, participate in collectively bullying a particular individual to climb the corporate ladder.
Honestly, I believe I've described how a large proportion of B2B companies operate.
You can also read more here about [why B2B prospecting efforts fail within companies].
The lesson is simple: don't hire internally for a particular function, especially in a leadership position, unless you understand how that function actually works yourself.
One bad hiring decision in a strategic position can be enough to seriously damage a company for years.
Avoiding the Corporate Politics Black Hole
To avoid the political black hole that affects so many startups and large corporations, you need to make sure that whoever is responsible for hiring in a particular department actually knows what they're doing.
Ideally, founders should develop strong skills across all the company's key functions. They should start by doing things themselves, learn how to do them properly, and only then begin delegating.
If they can't do everything themselves or lack expertise in certain areas, they should work with specialized agencies or freelancers instead.
Some of them will deliver poor results, but at least they won't be permanently embedded in the organization. You can try several providers and switch until you find the right one.
Personally, I estimate that only around 25% of agencies and freelancers operating in outsourced B2B prospecting are actually competent.
How to Improve B2B Sales Performance
1. Train the founders first
Founders need to understand how things work before delegating them.
Do it yourself, research the subject, consider coaching or professional guidance, and learn how to build high-quality B2B prospect lists and run effective prospecting campaigns.
Within three months, you could become competent enough to start delegating the work properly.
2. Don't bring sales in-house too early
If you don't know how to do something yourself, you shouldn't rush into hiring an internal team to do it for you.
As explained above, this can be a major mistake that ends up creating an entirely useless department.
By following this approach, you can build a company culture based on actual performance rather than appearances.
Conclusion: Why Are Your Salespeople Underperforming?
Here's my honest answer to any B2B founder wondering why their salespeople are underperforming or seemingly doing nothing:
It's your fault. Their incompetence is simply a reflection of your own.
If you actually knew how to run multichannel B2B prospecting, your situation would undoubtedly be very different. Your employees wouldn't be able to pretend they know what they're doing, and you probably wouldn't have hired such an incompetent Sales Director in the first place.
So here's my advice: educate yourself, and/or outsource your prospecting to recognized experts in their field.
Don't simply hire a Sales Director because they look good on paper and have previously held the same title at another company.
If you want to build an effective sales team without all the unnecessary internal politics, I can help you build an Outbound Machine for your market. Or coach your salespeople. Send me an email at louis@outbound-machine.com.