A Sales Force of One

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"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."

It's hard to say exactly when Rosen gave up. It could have been March or maybe it was April. The weeks blurred together. But it was clear that he was psychologically defeated. He knew that "no sales warrior would say retreat," but that's exactly what he did. He quietly put his client list in a file folder and stopped making calls for a while. He would just take the business that he already had and stop trying to build on it. He decided to take a little sabbatical from selling, calculating that with his three-person staff and just 20 remaining HR temp workers, he could maintain about $3 million in revenue. In other words, his business was back to where it was in the days before he hired his first salesperson.

Nearly a year after Rosen embarked on his failed experiment, the Rosen Group is still alive. In mid-November, he was on target to hit his year-end sales projection of $2.5 million to $3 million, the value of his 17 or so corporate contracts. With only four employees including himself and limited overhead in his smaller office space, he's steered his company back into the black.

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