A Sales Force of One

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.

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."

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4  NEXT