Selling@Zero Distance

Hiring a Sales Director?
You’re About to Answer a Question You Haven’t Asked.

You already have a sales system. You just didn’t design it.

A few years ago I worked with Laurent, a CEO who ran his sales team directly.

Halfway through the quarter, the numbers weren’t going to land. He called me in with one request: put more pressure on the salespeople.

I asked why.

They don’t visit enough customers, he said.

I showed him the visit reports. The visits were there.

Then it must be focus, he said. They’re not focused enough. And within a minute he had a solution: an exceptional bonus for the last weeks of the quarter.

I asked what it would change.

He figured the ones motivated by money would push harder and bring in more.

At no point in that conversation did he ask about a single deal.

Not what had surprised anyone about a customer that week. Not what the team actually knew about how a given customer would decide, versus what they were assuming. Not what the customer would say the real holdup was, in their own words, and whether anyone had asked. Not the one thing a rep most needed to find out before the next conversation.

Those questions felt slow to him. They wouldn’t create the energy he wanted before the quarter closed.

Here’s the thing.

He wasn’t a bad leader. He was managing a system he couldn’t see.

The system nobody designed

Every company that has sold anything for more than a year has a sales system.

Not the CRM. Not the pitch deck. Not the org chart.

The real one. The accumulated set of habits that produce this month’s numbers: why customers stay, how they actually decide, what the team really sells once it’s in the room, how a customer meeting runs, what gets tracked and what doesn’t, how anyone gets better at any of it.

Nobody wrote it down. It exists anyway.

And it was built by the founder, one decision at a time, usually while doing something else. Hiring the first rep. Accepting the first discount. Letting the pipeline review turn into a forecast review. Each choice was small. Together they became the machine.

That’s why it’s invisible. You can’t see a thing you built by accident.

Why the quick fix keeps failing

There’s a line often credited to Deming, though it belongs to Paul Batalden: every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.

Read it again with your quarter in mind.

The numbers aren’t a surprise. They’re the output of the machine, running exactly as it was built.

So pressure doesn’t change the output. A bonus doesn’t change the output. They change the effort inside the same machine, which produces the same result a little faster, or a little louder.

Laurent’s bonus was a bet placed on a table he couldn’t see. He had no idea which deals were stuck or why, so he had no way of knowing whether more effort would move them. He just knew that effort felt like leadership.

Now scale that up.

This is the CEO who, a year later, recruits a sales director. And the brief is simple: deliver the numbers.

Two things happen next, and I’ve watched both.

The new director brings in the system they know from their last company, because it worked there. I call it copy paste management. It fits the previous organisation perfectly and this one not at all.

Or the director adapts to the existing system without ever understanding it, because nobody in the building can describe it, including the person who built it.

Either way, six months later the CEO is back where Laurent was. Numbers short, asking for pressure, wondering why the expensive hire didn’t fix anything.

You can’t hand someone a system you’ve never looked at.

Your first job comes before the job description

If you’re about to recruit a sales director, the recruiting is not your first job.

Your first job is to see the machine.

Before the first interview, sit down with these:

A warning. Answering these on a slide is not the same as seeing the system.

The real test is simpler. Sit in on one pipeline review and listen for the questions Laurent never asked. If nobody in the room asks them, that silence is your system. And it’s the one your next hire will inherit, with a bigger salary attached.

The distance you’re about to hand over

There’s a distance between a CEO and the system they built. Most never measure it, because they’re standing inside it.

A sales director doesn’t close that distance. They inherit it.

The one who arrives into a system the CEO can describe has something to work with. The one who arrives into silence has a choice between importing a foreign machine and guessing at the local one.

Selling@Zero Distance™ starts with the leader’s distance from their own system, before anyone talks about the team’s distance from the customer. The second is built on the first.

You can’t hire your way out of a system you can’t see.

So, before you write the job description, one question is worth sitting with.

Could you explain, to someone who has never met your team,
why your customers buy from you?