A friend of mine, let’s call him Mark, owns a consulting business in Cleveland, Ohio.
We were having dinner one night when the conversation turned to the early years of his business and how close he came to firing the guy who would save it.
At the time, his business was struggling.
He created a service he believed in, and the clients who used it seemed happy. But sales were poor, and nothing they tried to improve the bottom line made a dent.
They rewrote the sales message, adjusted the price, bought more leads, and pushed the sales team to make more calls.
Still, nada.
My friend and his partners eventually reached what seemed like the obvious conclusion.
They needed to hire someone with more energy to sell than they had.
Before they interviewed candidates, they sat down and defined exactly what they expected the new sales leader to accomplish. They wanted someone who could build a stronger pipeline, coach the existing team, shorten the sales cycle, and increase revenue by at least 25 percent during the first year.
Out of 46 applicants, they interviewed ten people.
One man stood out.
He had previously sold complex consulting services, built sales teams, and helped turn around struggling divisions. He was direct and confident, but what impressed them most was the quality of his questions.
He seemed to be exactly what they were looking for.
So they hired him.
Right from the start, things did not go well and they felt like they had made a horrible hiring decision.
During his first few weeks, he spent more time talking to former clients and lost prospects than trying to close new business. He listened to old sales calls, reviewed proposals that had gone nowhere, and questioned nearly everything the company was doing.
At first, Mark assumed he was simply learning the business.
Then the new sales guy called an executive meeting and bluntly told them they were selling the wrong thing.
Mark’s company helped manufacturers improve employee performance through training and consulting. For years, they had presented their service as a way to build employee skills, improve supervision, and develop stronger teams.
Most of their sales conversations were with human resources and training departments.
The new sales guy saw the business differently.
He said the companies that hired them were not really buying training.
They were buying fewer production mistakes, less waste, lower turnover, and a better chance of getting customer orders out the door on time.
He believed they were speaking to the wrong people about the wrong problem.
Instead of selling training to human resources, he wanted the sales team talking to plant managers, operations leaders, and company owners.
He wanted them to stop leading with workshops, programs, and employee development.
He wanted them to lead with the costly business problems their work helped solve.
He also wanted to repackage the service, change the sales presentation, and price projects around the value of the problem rather than the number of training hours involved.
Mark told him he was wrong.
“We built this company,” he said. “We know our clients, and we know why they hire us.”
The new guy had barely been there two months.
But he wouldn’t let it go.
Every sales meeting became another argument. The sales team was confused, the owners were frustrated, and sales had not budged.
They hired him to sell the company’s service, but he just wanted to change the company’s flagship product.
Eventually, Mark called him into the office and told him it was not working.
They were letting him go.
He sat quietly for a moment and said, “No, you’re not. You need me. If you fire me, where do you go from here? Back to what’s not working?”
Mark was blown away. His first thought was, “No one talks to me like that.”
“What do you mean?” Marked asked.
“You’ll hire another salesperson and ask him to sell the wrong thing even harder.”
That didn’t help his case.
Then he leaned forward and said something Mark still remembers.
“Believe it or not, I’m probably the best thing that has happened to this company. You have a problem you don’t even know you have. Just give me 90 days of doing it my way.”
He wanted permission to rebuild the sales presentation, retrain the team, target a different type of buyer, and sell the business outcome clients were actually looking for.
“If I’m wrong, you can fire me then. But your sales are already poor. The way I see it, you have nothing to lose.”
Mark sat there for a moment, and as much as he hated to admit it, the guy had a point.
So they agreed to try it his way.
The sales team shifted their conversations from training to outcomes. They began asking business owners about missed production goals, costly errors, high turnover, poor supervision, and the time managers were spending fixing problems that should never have happened.
The response was almost immediate.
Clients who had little interest in another training program were very interested in reducing mistakes, keeping good employees, and improving production.
Old prospects began returning calls.
Proposals became larger.
Sales conversations moved away from training budgets and toward business outcomes.
The market had been trying to tell them what it wanted, but they were not listening.
Mark believed clients wanted better training.
What they really wanted was a business that ran better because their people performed better.
That single shift helped the company double sales three years in a row, which had never been done before.
And the man they nearly fired eventually became vice president of sales and a partner.
By the time Mark finished the story, dinner had been over for quite a while.
But I kept thinking about what he said.
Most business owners say they want to hire strong people.
But strong people don’t always make life easier.
They question things. They challenge the status quo. They see problems the rest of the company has learned to accept.
Sometimes that means you hired the wrong person.
But not always.
Sometimes the friction comes from hiring someone who sees the business clearly because they are not carrying all the history, pride, and assumptions that come with building it.
Mark thought he was hiring someone to drive sales.
What he actually hired was someone experienced enough to recognize that the plan itself was the problem.
There are a few lessons I take from his story.
The first is that you should clearly define what success in the role looks like before you hire someone. Mark and his partners knew the results they needed, even though they were wrong about how those results would ultimately be achieved.
The second is that experience should bring more than the ability to follow instructions. When you hire someone who has solved similar problems before, part of what you are paying for is their judgment.
You can’t ask for that judgment and then reject it simply because it challenges what you already believe.
The final lesson may be the hardest.
Before deciding that a new employee is the problem, make sure the real problem isn’t the plan you hired them to carry out.
The best hire is not always the person who follows your plan.
Sometimes it is the person willing to tell you that you have the wrong plan.
And sometimes playing the long game means being humble enough to listen before you fire them.
Keep playing the long game!
When you start a business, nobody hands you a manual. That’s why I write The Long Game.
Each week, I share stories, insights, and observations from the lessons I’ve learned—and the ones I’m still learning—about building a business, hiring the right people and creating a culture people want to be part of.
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