6 months ago we hired a sales person (Brian) in Chicago that agreed to work with us for 12 months and after that time he would relocated to Cincinnati.

Just recently I have heard team members suggest that Brian has less responsibility based on his updates to us during our weekly team meetings.  The new sales person reports into our president whom is extremely busy so I asked if I could get a list of accounts from Brian along with the account status to report back to the team.  Our president agreed and asked me to update him on what I found.

Later that week I met with Brian by phone and he quickly emailed me the status.

Knowing I had the results and a solution agreed to by our president I knew that I would get push back.  During the next team meeting I let the team know that Brian had capacity and that we needed our top sales person to drop 10 accounts, which I let him know to begin thinking about which accounts a few days earlier.  Our top sales person used the time to explain why he should not give up any accounts with a long list of reasons.  I stepped back in my mind, took a few slow breaths to be ready for when he finished.  I responded in a very low tone that these were all great reasons, but the reason we made the change was due to the fact that Brian was underutilized and that we needed our top sales persons time to be more focused on our top accounts.

4 weeks later, based on our committed action to close this by 8/31 I have the final list of accounts that our top sales person is willing to give up, I am happy with it and will think about it over the weekend before I confirm 100%, I made move one more account of the 15+ accounts to another person to more evenly work it out.

My response to our top sales person was calm in which he did not try to fight in front of everyone and agreed to a committed action date.

Have a great long weekend!!!

Jim Wilhelm
Director of Sales
Phone: (859) 538-8113
Cell: (513) 702-6554
Email: jwilhelm@galerieusa.com<mailto:jwilhelm@galerieusa.com>
[cid:14F25AB0-5AED-4F12-88A0-DCE6BA7C77A3]