Hiring sales people is important. Very important. When there is an opening, it is critical to get it filled. I don’t think anyone argues this. But, how important is it? How urgent is it? That can be up for debate — but should it be?
Let’s break down the impact of an open sales position for a second, shall we? If your e-commerce page that generates a few thousand dollars a day goes down, how long before you get it back up, 20 minutes, one hour, 4 hours, a day, a couple of days, how about a month? If you can’t get it back up, do you call in additional IT support? Do you hire outside resources to help? Does the problem escalate the longer it’s down? What is the acceptable length of time to you, your team, and the organization accept the e-commerce page to be down? If you were out of your best selling product and were losing $2000 dollars a day because you could no longer accept orders, how long before you got it back in stock? Would you pay overtime to get it produced? Would you pay overnight shipping? Would you bring in additional resources and employees to work all night to produce it? What would you do? How long do you go without your best selling product before it becomes urgent?
When business challenges get in the way of revenue, we act and we act quick! We do everything we can to prevent lost revenue. However, when it comes to open sales positions, we tend to move a little slower.
We wait for HR to draft the job description and place ads. We sometimes sit and wait for management to approve the new position, which at times can take weeks. When we finally get approval and start the search, it can take months before we settle on a final candidate and make an offer. In spite of all our best intentions, it can take us 30, 60, 90 days and longer to fill the open position — and that costs us real money! When there are open sales positions, we tend to move a little slower than we would if the e-commerce site were down or if we were out of our best selling product. For some reason, although its the same, we don’t see revenue generating sales people the same way, but we should. Why? Cause rarely do we quantify the cost of an open sales position. When the e-commerce page goes down we know EXACTLY how much money is not coming through the door.
This crystal clear data drives a tremendous amount of urgency. When the best selling product is no longer sitting on the shelves, we panic because we know how much money we’re losing. We’re not as good at doing that when we are down sales people.
Check this out:
An open sales position with a yearly quota of 800,000 dollars, that takes 30 days to hire for and 60 days to ramp up (both traditionally short periods of time) costs a company over $2,100 dollars a day AND over a whopping $197,000 dollars for the 90 days it takes to get the new rep hired, trained and producing. That’s a lot of lost revenue, and it just keeps adding up at $2,191 dollars a day, every day it goes past 90 days. That’s some serious coin.
I can’t think of any other part of the business that would put that kind of money at risk and allow that kind of loss. This isn’t just big sales positions with large quotas either. Even for open positions with smaller quotas, the impact is material. An unfilled sales position with a $150,000 quota, costs a company $410 dollars a day and $36,986 dollars over 90 days. 
Why let that kinda money drip out of the organization? Not filling sales positions faster and more efficiently has a real cost. Knowing what that cost is can help you accelerate the process and light a fire under the feet of everyone involved. Salespeople generate revenue, like your best selling product, like your e-commerce site, like your store front, so treat it that way.
Fill your sales positions faster! It’s worth it. To find out how much your open sales positions are costing you, download our Open Sales Cost Calculator.