A Sales Force of One

The trouble began in January 2001, when the company suffered its first-ever monthly sales decline. Suddenly, Rosen and his sales force found themselves getting to no with alarming speed. Each rep had to make twice as many phone calls just to make a handful of sales each month.

The drop was ostensibly no big deal, except that the Rosen Group had just completed five straight years of record growth, up 1,790% in that time period. So Rosen's initial response to the January report was understandable. "I kind of dismissed it," he says. But then sales were down in February and March, too. "Each month I thought it would turn around and so did everyone around me," he recalls.

"Scott seemed to be hit first and hardest by the economy," recalls Larry Joseph, a member of Rosen's local CEO peer group. Says Rosen: "Every month contracts decreased in a steady downward trend. It was a painfully torturous, slow decline." At first Rosen was stumped. Some people -- including his chief financial officer, his sales trainer, and his eight-person board of advisers -- suggested that the problem was Rosen himself. "They said, 'You're not managing your salespeople actively enough, and that's why they're not producing," remembers Rosen.

So Rosen resolved to get tough. He began requiring that the reps submit reports detailing their sales activity, such as phone interviews, appointments, referrals, and even "dials" -- or how many times they picked up the phone to try to reach someone. Such sales reporting is commonplace at larger companies, but Rosen didn't love the slavish approach to tracking productivity. "You could see people getting discouraged. No one likes cold-calling and rejection," he says. So he tried to lighten things up with events such as a summer competition. Csernica won the cash booty by making more than 500 phone calls, netting a record 24 face-to-face meetings. End result: a paltry six sales. "That was very discouraging," says Rosen.

He was losing money almost every month because the reps weren't making enough new sales to replace the corporate contracts that had ended. Sales were down anywhere from 5% to 10% most months, which translated into monthly net losses of about $10,000. And here he was paying his salespeople an average base salary of $60,000 on top of commissions. "My overhead was huge," Rosen says. "I was projecting $11 million in sales, up from $7.6 million. But I rationalized that I was investing in overhead to grow through this. I was in denial."

Then came 9/11. A month later Rosen finally began laying off his sales force. It was an emotional decision -- and one he agonized over with his peer group, one fellow member recalls -- but essentially, he had come to believe that he had no choice if he wanted to stem his losses. And having run out of options with his sales team, he concluded that he could sell his company's services on his own. Not surprisingly, Waks disagreed with Rosen's thinking. "I advised holding on to at least one salesperson," Waks recalls. "Scott didn't always follow my advice."

"I felt this market was conquerable," Rosen responds, "so I was on my white horse trying to prove I could sell through this." Still, for a few days in January 2002, before his three-person support staff reported to work, it was just Rosen and the four walls. "That first day with no one was scary," he says. But he also felt a sense of calm descend upon his deserted office. "I felt like I had some breathing room, some time to figure this out," he says. "I wanted to prove I could make something happen."

The first thing he did was to set a cold-call quota for himself. But he quickly dropped it. "I don't think that's what made me effective before," he says dismissively. Or maybe he was just a little rusty. "I needed to get my rhythm back." Plus, there was no Bob Waks around to help keep Rosen on track: he had fired his sales coach, too. "I said, 'Bob, I'm going to try this on my own. You know what? I need a break. I don't want to be coached." In part, Rosen suggests, it was just obvious to him that Waks's method wasn't working anymore. For Waks, it was a crushing blow, not only because he believed Rosen still needed his help but because the two men had become close friends.

With zeal, Rosen focused on former customers, corporate clients who at one time had been worth millions of dollars to the Rosen Group. He called 15 or 20 of them a day. But whether he went down the list by revenue or alphabetically from Advanta to Vanguard, the outcome rarely varied. "Clients said, 'We like you, you have a good reputation, but we're not hiring now, and we're not using outside recruiters," he says.

What would seem like a logical conclusion -- as companies slashed costs and laid off staff, they would turn increasingly to temp solutions until the economy rebounded -- was not, in fact, the case. "When a company is retrenching, you don't add contract employees," says one of Rosen's clients, Paul Antony, director of HR administration for electronic retailer QVC. "You use temps on the upside."

It was not the reception Rosen had anticipated. He had expected to hear, "Scott, we're so glad you're back in sales," and he'd expected to be able to arrange more face-to-face meetings. At least a few times a week, he did go to meetings. And a few of them even felt like the old days. Like the time he got a call from an HR director at a large pharmaceutical company that came to him on referral. Rosen felt excited as he walked into the prospect's large corner office. "I was still following the Sandler model -- establish a bond and rapport and try to find out 'What's his pain?' After pain, it's 'What's the budget?' Basically, there wasn't much pain, and he didn't have a budget," Rosen says. "You can always tell if there's pain. There's an energy and urgency in a person's voice....He just wanted to know how much I mark up my contractors. That was a red flag. We agreed he'd be better off running an ad on Monster.com to -- quote, unquote -- 'get a body.' I didn't storm out; it was a cordial ending." But it was one more strikeout, he says, in "a steady diet of rejection."

He tried lowering his price, but that didn't win him much business either. There just wasn't work to be had. Rosen, the guy who had once cold-called his way to $3 million in business, could not overcome the immovable object of a slow economy. But there was something even more painful than not getting the order. It was how some customers now treated him -- as "the evil salesperson," Rosen says. It brought back his old image of salespeople as pushy and manipulative. He didn't want to be one of them.

Rosen was wracked by two strong and conflicting feelings. On one side of his brain, he could hear the voice of the uber-salesman who would never say die, personified by his old mentor Waks: "Get out there, man, and sell. You can cold-call your way to success. Dig deeper!" But another voice whispered something quite different. It said, "Stop banging your head against the wall."