Why “When” Comes Before “How”#

Letting people go is the most stressful part of a sales manager’s life. The second most stressful is being fired yourself. These two are tightly linked:

“If you don’t get some experience with the first, you are going to get some experience with the second.”

If you cannot let go of poor performers, you will eventually be replaced by someone who can.

Peter Drucker put it more bluntly:

“A manager who keeps an incompetent person in place is himself incompetent and does not deserve the position of manager.”

Knowing when to fire is therefore a core competency — not a peripheral one. The mechanics of the actual conversation are covered in the next chapter; this one is about the decision.

The 1/3 – 1/3 – 1/3 Rule of Sales Hiring#

Even with a strong selection process, sales hiring follows a roughly trinomial distribution:

• About one-third of new hires will work out and become reasonably successful, if not stars.
• About one-third will be average performers.
• About one-third will not work out at all — either immediately or over the long term.

This is why annual sales-team churn typically runs around 30 percent. Like change itself, it is inevitable, unavoidable, and never-ending.

Accepting this reality is the first step in being able to act on it.

The Cost of Keeping the Wrong Person#

A central law of organizational life:

“Everybody knows everything.”

Everyone in your office knows the relative competence of everyone else.

Keeping a poor performer in place sends a louder message than any motivational speech you could give:

• It tells the team that poor performance is rewarded with a regular paycheck.
• It tells the team that excellent performance gets only an occasional pat on the head.
• It demoralizes top performers — exactly the people you can least afford to lose.

The cost of inaction is therefore not zero. It is paid in the morale and engagement of everyone who is performing.

Jim Collins’s Bus#

Jim Collins, in Good to Great, frames team-building in three sequential moves:

“Get the right people on the bus. Get the wrong people off the bus. And then get the right people into the right seats on the bus.”

Notice the order: getting the wrong people off comes before arranging the right people in the right seats. You cannot build a great team while the wrong people are still on board.

The Decision Test: Zero-Based Thinking#

The single most useful question for deciding whether someone should be on your team is the zero-based thinking question:

“Is there anyone working for me today who, knowing what I now know, I would not hire back again today, if I had to do it over?”

If the honest answer is yes, then by definition you are keeping someone you would not hire — which means you have already made the decision. You are simply postponing acting on it.

When Is the Right Time?#

The rule: the best time to fire a person is the first time that it crosses your mind.

Each delay accumulates costs:

• More damage to team morale.
• More effort wasted on someone who will not succeed.
• More time the wrong person occupies a seat the right person could fill.
• More personal anxiety for the manager.

Acting decisively, the moment the thought becomes serious, is both kinder and more professional than letting it drag.

What Looks Like Compassion Often Isn’t#

Holding on to a poor performer is often framed internally as kindness. It rarely is:

• The salesperson is trapped in a job they cannot succeed at, watching peers earn more.
• Their self-esteem erodes the longer they stay.
• The longer the mismatch lasts, the harder it is to land the next role.
• The team learns to lower its standards.

Letting someone go promptly often gives them a faster path to the right job — for them. The truly compassionate move is rarely the comfortable one.

What You Owe to Whom#

Firing is part of the job description, not an exception to it. Just as hiring is 95 percent of building an effective sales team, firing is also an essential part of the sales manager’s job.

You owe this discipline to three constituencies:

• The company, which is paying for results.
• Your other salespeople, whose morale depends on standards being real.
• Yourself, because failure to act eventually costs you your own role.

Action Exercises#

1. Run the zero-based thinking question across your entire team this week. “Knowing what I now know, would I rehire this person today?” Be honest. The names that surface are your decision queue.
2. For each person who fails the test, set a firm date in the next two weeks to act — using the conversation framework in the next chapter.