Here’s something I want to credit to Robin Wesolowski at Covisian, who gave me a genius insight and named a pattern I’ve been circling for years. When any other department in a company struggles, upper management’s first instinct is to look at the department’s tools, systems, and processes. When sales struggles, the first place they look is activity and effort.
Think about how differently we treat the two situations. If your production numbers fall, you examine the equipment, the workflow, the materials, the maintenance schedule. If your fulfillment times slip, you audit the process. If accounting is making errors, you look at the software and the procedures before you look at the accountant. In every one of these cases, the reflex is to interrogate the system first and the person second.
Sales gets the opposite treatment. When the numbers come in soft, the first questions are about the rep. Are they making enough calls? Are they working hard enough? Do they want it badly enough? And if effort isn’t obviously the issue, the next question is about ability — do they simply have what it takes? Either way, we reach for a character diagnosis before we ever reach for a systems diagnosis, and that single reflex costs companies more money and more good people than almost anything else I see in this business. Everything I teach in the Navigator’s Chart is built on the opposite instinct — that a sales organization is a system to be designed, not a collection of personalities to be motivated.
Why Sales Gets Singled Out
There’s a reason sales draws this treatment, and we need to understand it before we talk about what it costs.
Sales is the only function in the company where individual variation is visible and constant. Put two reps in the same territory, with the same product, the same pricing, and the same tools, and they’ll produce different numbers. One will close more than the other. That difference is real, and everyone can see it, month after month, right there on the board.
That visibility is exactly what fools us. Because the variance is real, effort looks like the thing causing it. When one rep outproduces another on identical resources, the obvious conclusion is that the difference must be the person — the hustle, the drive, the character. And sometimes it partly is. But visible does not mean causal. Effort may simply be the most visible variable, not the one actually driving the result. The salesperson is working the same Waters as everyone else on the team — the same buyers, the same market conditions — which strips away the easy external explanation and leaves only the person standing there to blame.
Nobody watches two machinists produce different output on the same line and concludes the tooling must be fine. We’d examine the setup, the training, the machine each one was running. But in sales, the individual is so prominent that we skip straight past the system and land on the person.
Or, Plan B: Ability
Effort is the first thing we question, but it isn’t the only one. When a rep is clearly working hard and the numbers still don’t come, the diagnosis usually shifts to ability — maybe they just don’t have what it takes.
That conclusion runs in two directions, and I want to be fair about both. Sometimes it leads to an investment in training, and I’m not going to stand here and complain about that — developing salespeople is real work that produces real results, and frankly it’s part of how I make my living. Training a rep who’s fighting a broken structure won’t save them, but training a capable rep inside a sound structure is one of the highest-return things a company can do.
The other direction is where it goes wrong. Management concludes the salesperson simply lacks the ability, and they let them go — and I want you to remember this: in almost every case, that judgment was made on gut instinct. No psychometric profile was ever run. No structured assessment of the traits the role actually requires. Somebody watched the numbers, formed an impression, and rendered a verdict on a human being’s capabilities without a shred of actual data behind it. We would never evaluate a piece of equipment that way. We’d measure it. But we’ll decide a person “isn’t cut out for sales” on a feeling.
That’s the thread running under this entire problem. Gut instinct is standing in for data, and it’s making expensive decisions while it does it.
The Chain That Follows
Once you start with a character diagnosis — whether the charge is effort or ability — a predictable chain unfolds, and every link looks reasonable from the inside.
Results disappoint. Management responds the way a character diagnosis tells them to — push harder on activity, tighten accountability, demand more calls and more visits. Results still disappoint, because the actual cause was structural and no amount of pushing changes a structure. So management draws the only conclusion the character frame allows: the rep was the problem. They’re replaced.
The new rep arrives and steps into the same compensation plan that rewarded the wrong things, the same sales process that was never documented, the same hiring profile that nobody ever wrote down, and all of it perhaps created for a set of buying habits that doesn’t exist anymore. They underperform too — of course they do, because nothing that produced the last failure has changed. And they get replaced in turn.
That’s the machine. And it produces two conclusions that feel like hard-won wisdom but are actually just artifacts of the machine itself.
The first is that high sales turnover reflects a bad labor pool. It doesn’t. The turnover is what a character diagnosis manufactures mechanically. When you keep swapping the person while holding the system constant, you generate a stream of failures that has nothing to do with the quality of the people passing through.
The second is the belief that finally settles in after the fourth or fifth failed hire: “We just can’t hire good salespeople.” That belief is durable because from the inside, it’s genuinely indistinguishable from a real supply problem. After four people have failed in the same seat, the pattern really does look like the labor market let you down. The one thing that visibly changed each time was the person, so the person is where the eye lands. The comp plan didn’t change. The undocumented process didn’t change. The hiring profile didn’t change. The only variable anyone could see was the human being, and the human being kept failing, so the humans must be the problem.
They weren’t. The seat was. Every rep who failed was a Crew problem in name, but a Vessel problem in fact — the boat was built to sink, and we kept blaming the people who went down with it.
If your sales problem were a manufacturing problem, you’d have looked at the system a year ago.
I Made This Exact Mistake
I’m not describing this from a distance. I did it myself, and I did it with total confidence.
In 1998 I took over the worst-performing sales branch in the country. Dead last. And I did what I knew how to do — I pushed. Prospecting quotas, activity metrics, accountability, all of it. For five months I coached hard and held people to standards, and it worked, sort of. The branch climbed from worst in the country to the bottom half. Real movement, and I was proud of it.
Then on January 1, 1999, we changed the compensation plan. My General Manager and I tripled the multiplier on the product line that the company actually wanted us selling. That was it — one structural change to what the comp plan paid for.
By April, my branch led the entire company. And it stayed there for two years.
Now, it would be easy to conclude that the coaching didn’t matter and the comp plan did all the work. That’s the wrong lesson, and I want to be clear about it. The coaching didn’t fail. It was loaded and waiting. Five months of building activity, discipline, and skill had put a capable, hard-working branch in place — and that branch had nowhere to express itself because the structure didn’t pay for the thing the company wanted done. The moment the structure changed, all that coached-up capability had somewhere to go, and it went there fast.
Structure doesn’t replace coaching. Structure determines whether coaching sticks. I could have pushed activity for another year and stayed in the bottom half forever, because I was coaching people to swim against a current the comp plan was generating. Change the current, and the same people I’d been developing became the best in the company in ninety days. I’d spent five months working on the Crew when the problem was in the Vessel the whole time.
What This Should Change
The point isn’t that effort and ability don’t matter. They do. A lazy rep is a real problem, a genuine skills gap is a real problem, and coaching and training are real work that produce real results. The point is the order of operations.
When sales disappoints, resist the reflex to diagnose the person first. Ask the questions you’d ask about any other department. Is the compensation plan actually paying for the behavior we want? Is there a documented sales process, or is every rep improvising? Was the hiring profile ever written down, or do we hire on gut and hope? Does the structure make success possible for a capable person working hard — or are we asking good people to overcome a system we built wrong and never examined? Those are Vessel questions, and they come before any question about the Crew.
Diagnose the system first, the way you already do everywhere else in your company. Then coach and train — because development aimed at a sound structure sticks, and development aimed at overcoming a broken one just wears out good people until they quit or get fired and become one more data point in your case that nobody good is available. And when you do reach a judgment about a person’s ability, base it on an actual assessment, not a gut feeling formed while staring at a scoreboard.
That last point is one I take seriously enough to apply to myself. What I’ve laid out here is a hypothesis. It matches what I’ve seen across a lot of companies and a lot of years — but I’ve just spent a whole article warning you about the cost of letting gut instinct stand in for data, and I’m not going to exempt my own convictions from that standard. So I have a multi-industry study underway right now measuring exactly this: whether sales really does get diagnosed as a character problem where other departments get diagnosed as systems problems, and what that difference costs. The numbers land in January. When they do, this stops being my instinct and starts being data — and I’ll share it either way.
