Scott Rosen fired his entire sales staff, figuring he could do better all by himself.
No one can say Scott Rosen didn't try.
Even his former salespeople give him that. "There was no quitting for that guy," says Mick Csernica, a salesman for the Rosen Group until a year ago. "He did everything he could to shake things up."
The sole owner and CEO of a human-resources recruiting and staffing firm, Rosen tried to light one fire after another under his eight salespeople. When they went on sales calls, he rode shotgun. When sales declined, he opened his wallet and offered $2,000 to the rep who scored the most appointments with potential clients. He redoubled his training efforts and tracked his reps' progress continuously. But when that didn't work either, he began to suspect that his people just weren't trying hard enough. At that point, he resorted to a move that company owners sometimes make to shake up the sales force: he changed the sales-compensation plan midyear, raising the compensation rate by about 35% and cutting base salaries by about the same percentage. He says he thought his staff would like the change. "The salespeople had the potential to make more money," he says. "I thought the change would bring out their hungriness." It didn't. One salesperson quit in protest.
So Rosen tried a different tack: he offered to spend more time helping the most promising reps if they in turn would take on more diverse responsibilities. They refused. "That sealed it for me," says Rosen. "No one said, 'I'll do whatever it takes.' Everyone wanted to maintain the same position they had in good times." Rosen could barely contain the growing frustration he felt toward his underachievers. "There were only so many times I could say, 'Why didn't you make your numbers?"
The more he thought about his sales reps, the angrier he became. This was not the way things were supposed to turn out. At the beginning of 2001, he had expected to grow at least 40%. And so, by October of that year, Rosen finally did something he'd been contemplating for weeks. He laid off half his salespeople, as well as several other core staffers. But even that didn't work. Thanks to his own success in landing a few big contracts, he managed to finish the year with only slightly declining sales -- but that still added up to a $100,000 loss. At that point, Rosen did the unthinkable: he fired the rest of the sales force and nearly every person on staff. Where he once employed 15 people in three offices, suddenly there was no one. Salesman Csernica, who was among the second group to get the ax, says he suspects that Rosen woke up one day and decided that he needed to "burn the village" in order to save it. Even Rosen doesn't contend that his decision was completely rational. But when everyone told him he was making a grave mistake, he consoled himself with one thought: "I'll show them I can sell." That was one year ago.
Before he founded the Rosen Group at the age of 36, Scott Rosen had had no sales experience whatsoever. For 16 years he'd worked as an HR and operations executive for the likes of Prudential, Cigna, and GE Capital before he tired of big-company life. In June 1995 he began the Rosen Group in Cherry Hill, N.J., in his spare second-floor bedroom, which he dubbed "Suite 210." By the year he turned 40, Rosen had single-handedly built a book of business worth nearly $3 million.
Rosen originally started out selling himself as a high-level HR consultant, but the business quickly morphed into providing HR specialists, from recruiters to 401(k) administrators. In short, he needed to sell two things: human-resources temps to corporate clients and his services to the prospective temps. And he was good at it. Rosen figured he closed 50% of his sales calls to prospective corporate customers. But he wasn't a natural. "I didn't think of myself as a salesperson," he says. "I used to view selling as this terrible, evil thing."
But he also knew that to grow a business, he had to get over that aversion. He signed up for a year of courses and one-on-one coaching from the Sandler Sales Institute, in Stevenson, Md., one of the more popular programs aimed at entrepreneurs. The institute was started about 30 years ago by David Sandler, a frustrated salesman, who taught selling basics infused with his own version of "I'm OK, you're OK" pop psychology. Rosen hooked up with Bob Waks, the Sandler licensee for the Philadelphia area, who quickly became his round-the-clock sales coach and confidant. "My first impression was that Scott had very few skills as a salesperson," says Waks. "But there are two things we can't teach: commitment and desire -- the passion to do sales and the willingness to want to make money. You've got to bring those with you. And Scott did."
"I was totally pumped to sell," Rosen agrees. "I called everyone I'd ever known, then I started cold-calling from a list of the 100 fastest-growing Philadelphia-area companies" -- a list, published by the Philadelphia Business Journal, that the Rosen Group would one day appear on.
CALLING PLAN: When he went solo, Rosen zeroed in on former customers.
From Waks, Rosen quickly learned little tricks: smiling when you're talking on the phone as a reminder to stay positive and standing up rather than sitting while you're on the phone as a way of feeling more powerful. "One in 10 calls, maybe, I'd get through to the HR manager," he recalls. But he didn't let those odds discourage him. Little successes buoyed him. He had found a new calling. "It was thrilling," he recalls. "I can sell!"
The most important piece of advice that Rosen absorbed: "Try not to act like a salesperson." Working with Waks made him realize he had been "selling" all along in his previous corporate jobs. All he had to do was imagine himself back at GE, persuading department heads to adopt his HR programs. "What surprised me was how similar it was to the basic communications-skills training I had received as a human-resources executive. It was just packaged differently," he says.
Of course, sales school wasn't all just "Act natural." There was some technique involved. Rosen learned, for example, that when you reach the critical moment of truth with a prospect -- when it's time to do the deal or move on -- it's far better to get "no" than to hear "maybe."
Though Rosen pulled in just $40,000 during those first six months, the next year was better, 10 times better: $402,000 in revenue. Before he moved out of "Suite 210" in 1997, he hired a marketing specialist and a recruiter who filled the temp positions. By then, he says, "business was coming to me." Landing big-name customers like Towers Perrin put him on the map. "I'd get two to three calls a day from HR directors -- 'I need to hire a recruiter,' or 'I need a benefits person."
When he began to build his sales force, in late 1998, Rosen -- with help from Waks -- tried to instill the same lessons in his recruits. By 1999, his first full year with sales help, Rosen led his team to $5 million in sales. That was 60% better than the CEO's own personal best. At the company's peak, in 2000, Rosen's eight reps generated about 70% of the company's $7.6 million in sales. "I probably would have continued to hire salespeople," he says. But then the market changed.
