Leveraging Leadership

Listener Q&A: Managing Sales Reps Who Focus on Rebranding Over Revenue

• Emily Sander • Season 1 • Episode 234

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Emily Sander talks about what to do when a Business Development Rep starts doing graphic design, website tweaks, and HubSpot updates instead of making calls. She shares ways to set clear expectations, give frequent feedback, and explains when it's time to let someone go if things don't change. Examples include weekly check-ins, specific quotas, and distinguishing useful creativity from distracting tasks.


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Who Am I?

If we haven’t yet before - Hi👋 I’m Emily, Chief of Staff turned Executive Leadership Coach. After a thrilling ride up the corporate ladder, I’m focusing on what I love - working with people to realize their professional and personal goals. Through my videos here on this channel, books, podcast guest spots, and newsletter, I share new ideas and practical and tactical tools to help you be more productive and build the career and life you want. 

 

Time Stamps:

00:57 Coaching and Feedback Essentials
01:38 Clarifying Roles and Responsibilities
02:46 Distinguishing Productive vs. Distracting Activities
04:58 Implementing Accountability Measures
08:35 Addressing Cold Calling Challenges
09:58 Making the Tough Decision to Move On
13:12 Final Thoughts and Listener Engagement

emily-sander_2_10-29-2025_151605:

Alright, listener question. Time anonymous asks. We brought on a business development person to actually make calls, but somehow they've become our unofficial graphic designer, website strategist and HubSpot interior decorator. Every day there's a new color coded pipeline or flyer idea. Just no calls happening. The ideas aren't wrong, but at this point we need revenue, not rebranding. Do we coach them or do we just call it what it is and move on? All right. of course I'm gonna say coach them if you haven't already. I kind of assume that you have, but just to cover that base. Yes. Give them feedback, coach them, give them the tools they need. I think that most. BD business development roles are fairly clear at the outset when they're brought on board, but maybe not. Like maybe things have changed since you hired this person. Maybe things were going so quickly and you were scaling so fast at the time. Someone didn't really have a clear job description, or the onboarding and training process was non-existent at that time. So if you have any of those types of scenarios. I would absolutely go back and just level set on all that stuff. So there might be an establishing of expectations or resetting expectations from what was originally done. So it might be things like, it sounds like it's things like, Hey, look, this is in scope for your role, and these types of things are out of scope for your role. Right? So you're like a business development rep, so you're like, we don't need you on the website or whatever. Now, within that, there's a little nuance that I would say here. To me, there's a difference between, um, let me just give an example here. If they're saying. I listened to a whole bunch of people talk. I've done hundreds of these prospecting calls now, and I always get these three questions in some form or shape or another. I always get three these three questions and I've tried like different talk tracks around this. And what I found to work well is this analogy, this visual that I can describe to people. They go, oh. Oh, I get it. Okay. No, that really resonates. That really resonate. It clicks with them and then they're going, okay. So I tried to create like a, a graphic design around that visual. Okay. To me, that's like legitimate, that's like you're doing your job, you're listening, you've come up with a creative solution, and now you're trying to create a visual that maybe you can show on your screen when you're talking to them. Or maybe you can send them in the follow up email or maybe you're. Proactively sending this out before you talk to them and say, Hey, hey, here's what I wanna talk to you about. Can we jump on a call like 15 minutes and, and discuss further type of thing? To me, that's actually them doing their job in a really great way. Um, if you're like, yes, Emily, but we're not talking about that. We're talking about them, uh, trying to be the website strategist and they're going back and forth on this shade of purple for the button or that shade of purple for the button and this background color versus that background color is like, we don't, our website works fine. Like, we don't need you doing that. Then I would just make a distinction between what's. More in their wheelhouse and more of a legitimate activity that's related to what they're trying to do and the outcome you want and frivolous, distracting activities. okay. And if they do have ideas about marketing collateral or assets they would need, give them the place to send those. So for instance, it might be like, submit this ticket over here and then we queue them and then I help the graphic design team pick which one is top priority or whatever. So kind of tell them where to go with that, with those ideas, uh, type of thing. That's just an example. Okay. So let's say that. All these things have happened, Emily. The role is, is clear at the outset. We did have a robust onboarding and training process. Everyone knows where to go to submit these things. For marketing assets, uh, we have a whole website team and as far as like HubSpot, interior decorator, we have a whole sales operations team. Like we have a CRM system. It's not like this is our first and only BD person and we are so new we don't have. Stages of our pipeline built into HubSpot, like if this person's trying to do that and get it off the ground, that's, to me, is different than like, no, no, no, no, no. Like we have all this established, just make the fricking calls type of thing. So I would parse all of this stuff out. So all of this has happened. I would coach them in the sense of providing clarity and providing a more robust. Accountability apparatus, let's just say this is not code for be mean to them, right? it's providing clarity and providing more accountability. So that could come in the form of. Making sure they're clear about their scope of work and what's inside that and what's outside that. And obviously most salespeople have like quotas, so most people are really attuned to that. But if they're not, make sure that's crystal clear. We expect you to make 200 calls a week, and of those 200 calls, 25 should lead to demos that you hand off to this other team member. And of those we know, three are usually closed. One. So your job. Speedy rep is to make that initial outreach, email, phone, call, whatever, and get the appointment or get the full demo with this other sales team member. And we've typically seen these talk track works. We have these marketing collateral assets you can use, and your job is to smile and dial and to get these people on the phone with this other team member. So making that part of it crystal clear. And then maybe in terms of accountability, I've heard, I was just talking to someone who was on a sales team and they were like, Emily, I think we have a problem with communication and feedback to our reps. And I was like, oh, okay. Like what makes you, what makes you say that? And uh, he said, well, I was talking to one of my managers and they said they only talk to their reps every quarter. And I was like, I'm sorry, did you say every month? They're like, no, no, no. Like four times a year. And I was like, that's a problem. That's a problem, right? So if that's like the cadence you have with your reps, that's too infrequent, right? You should be meeting with them weekly, if not, more than that, or at least a month. Uh, I've been around sales operations teams, BD teams, sales teams where they have to send dailies. They have to send a daily report out to their boss about the activities they did that day, and they would get feedback and coaching. They would, the manager would listen to a call, a recorded call that their sales rep did, and they would go through it with them. Not to beat up on them, but just to have a feedback loop of like, Hey, this is, this is really good. I actually wanna share this line. With the team.'cause this is awesome. Like you came up with that super creative. Uh, here I would use this line of questioning. I might change this word. It softens it a little bit. It makes them more like it's their decision versus you telling them what to do and just having feedback like that. So there might be. More of an accountability and also training opportunities within the structure they have. So I would take a look at that, make sure that they're getting the feedback in the way and the frequency they need it to be. So you've made things crystal clear, right? About what their role is and is not. You've made the quota an expectation of activity and level of activity and what time duration they have to make that activity happen. Right? And then you've given them the checkpoints. We're not letting you loose for a quarter. We've got at least a monthly check-in, if not a weekly, if not a daily check-in or feedback loop for you. So all these things need to be in place. And then if it's still to the point where it's like Emily. They won't make the actual calls. Alright, let's say all of that is in place and you're like, Emily, like, look, they've got all that. They're just distracting themselves. They're just avoiding making the calls. And part of me goes like, I totally get that.'cause cold calling is hard. It's like one of the reasons I don't do it.'cause like it's hard and you get rejected, you get hung up on and it's hard to call strangers outta the blue and have a conversation with them. That's a skill, that's an art, right? But that's their job in this case. So sometimes. Calling that out and highlighting that, and almost like hitting the nail on the head and saying, it seems like you're doing these other activities to distract yourself or avoid making the actual calls. Pause. See what their response is. It could open up some conversations in directions that you don't predict, where it's like, oh, like, oh, I didn't know that. You know, you were doing it for this reason, or, oh, I didn't know that your mindset was like this, or, oh, I didn't know that. You kind of go through these. Lulls of yep, I kind of gotta get myself RevD back in. I'm so sorry I do this, I know I do this, but I'm stuck and now I just, I know what I need to do to get myself out of that. Now that you've said that, and now that it's explicit that it's, it's a parent that I'm in this stage of things or whatever. So you might hit it on the head like that. If that step doesn't resonate, you can skip it. It's just an idea. But, Beyond that. If you've gone through all of that and you've gated through all of that, you've given someone every opportunity, you've made it crystal clear, you've waited a certain amount of time. So you set the expectation, gave'em the tools they need, and gave'em like at least like a week if not two, to like see if they can, they can do the thing. If you're like, we've done all that, we've done all that, then it might be time to move on. It might be time to, like you said, just call it what it is and move on. Okay. And right here, a guideline for you. This is a universal guideline for not just this particular situation, but for any team member you have. If you know that it's not a good fit, and if you know that eventually this person's gonna have to be exited, do that sooner rather than later. So there might be extenuating circumstances where, Hey Emily, we have to wait a week or two for this, this and this reason for this person to come back from leave or whatever. Like, okay, fine. But as soon as you know like this is not gonna work out and it's not good for us and it's not good for them, maybe they're miserable. Maybe they dread coming to work every day'cause they know they're not quite chaining the bar. As soon as you know that and you've made that decision, take action on it. And exit them. Do it with grace and dignity and all those things. Professional, but don't drag it on. Do not drag it on for weeks and weeks, months and months. I have seen this happen and I have done it a few times myself, and it's not the way to go. I'm just telling you like if, if you know in your heart of hearts that this is not the right fit, but yet it's. Give them one more try. Like, just let'em do one more month and see what happens. Or we gave them this thing and like, maybe it'll be different. And I, I, I really don't think so. I, I know it's not gonna make a difference, but let me just try this thing out here. Um, they're a warm body. It's better than nothing. It's a pain in the ass to hire new people and they're just in there, they're doing their thing. Don't do that. Don't do that. it's bad for you, it's bad for the team and it's probably bad for the person. So as soon as you have made that decision and made that distinction of we've done everything we can, this isn't a good fit. It's time to move on, then, then move on, then take action on that. So that would be my general guideline there. Um, another guideline or just rubric or way you can think about it is I. Would much rather work with someone. I have to hold back like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like, hold on, hold on, hold on. I have to reign in and I have to hold back versus someone, I gotta cattle prod you to do your job. I'm gonna have to prod you at every step of the way to get you to do your own fricking job. I don't have time for this. I don't have time for this. So I have worked with both types of people. I would much rather the former than the latter. The former has, its like cons where it's like, dude, like I said, draft the email, not send the email. Now I got the email out to the CEOs, da da da. I didn't say to do that. You got, you got ahead of your skis there. But I'd much rather have that in a good spirit, in a professional way than someone I'm like. Come on, buddy. Here we go. Okay, here we go to the next step. All right, here we go. My gosh, they're sliding backward. No, no, no. Here we go. And I have to kind of, you know, tie a rope around it and drag it up a hill like every step of the way. That's dead weight. That's no good. So that's another kind of way to look at this. Hey, did they have like the, the chutzpah, like the drive, like the ugh, like the oomph in, in, in them? Or is it like, Hey, I got like a bump on a log. We're dealing with like sludge here. Like there's not a lot I can work with here. So those are just two things to think about, um, in there. All right, so hopefully something I've said is useful and you can take it and run with it and we'll help you make a decision or come to a good place with this scenario you've described. But thank you for submitting your question, and if anyone else listening has a question they want covered on an episode, then feel free to email me at emily@nextlevel.coach or find me on LinkedIn or drop it in the comments. And with that, I will catch you next week on leveraging leadership.