Time and again, I see companies assigning more tasks to particularly successful individuals, delegating more responsibility to them and entrusting them with resolving particularly difficult customer issues. This could be the founder, who conducts the most important sales meetings themselves, or the top salesperson, who is given the most challenging opportunities. The promotion of the best salesperson to head of sales often follows this logic too. What seems sensible in the short term can become a problem in the long term: with every success, dependence on individual people grows.
The ‘problem’ with top performers
From a sales perspective, top performers are those individuals who consistently and reliably meet their targets; they perform significantly better than their colleagues. They do not become a brake on growth because of their strong performance, but because of the dependence that develops around them. The more frequently top performers look after key clients, make difficult decisions or withhold knowledge critical to success, the more firmly the conviction takes root within the company: We can’t do without these people. The fact that management accepts this dependency as long as the figures are right is the actual mechanism behind the transition to becoming a brake on growth.
Why does this trend go so often unnoticed?
The halo effect – the overvaluation of an individual because of their good figures – causes all the negative aspects to fade into the background.
Do more of what the top performer does? No!
The reflex with which many sales organisations react to top performers centres on the workload: if the others do more of what the top performer does, they’ll become just as good. Ultimately, this only scales activity. Anyone who clings to this way of thinking faces a simple risk: if the top performer is absent – be it due to illness, holiday or other short-term reasons – a major gap will arise because no one else possesses skills and abilities similar to those of the top performer. The potential consequence: slower growth or even a decline in turnover.
To prevent this, it is essential that you find out whether your sales organisation can function without top performers. In fact, time and again I come across the same five misconceptions in companies that lead to top performers becoming obstacles to growth.
Misconception 1: Nobody can do it as well as our top performer.
This assumption isn’t fundamentally wrong. It may even be true. That is precisely what makes it dangerous. It is often the case that the founder conducts the most important sales meetings and takes on all the more challenging opportunities. The high conversion rate proves him right. But this creates a scalability problem: Specialist knowledge is tied to a single person; it does not multiply.
Added to this is an effect that is regularly observed in sales: The founder’s sales pitch turns into a product or investor pitch. He goes into great detail about the origins of ‘his’ company. This takes time. What falls by the wayside is the focus on what the customer actually needs. Internally, this rarely goes unnoticed because the founder is successful with his sales pitch.
How can you rectify this mistake?
What matters is not who is best at something today, but whether the organisation will be able to do it tomorrow even without that person. You should therefore create systems that make the expertise of individual people available to everyone. This is how you multiply specialist knowledge. It requires three building blocks:
- Effective processes that carry the workload – rather than a single person who is best at everything.
- Staff who receive regular training and professional development.
- A tool stack that supports both.
It is also necessary to specify which discussions and which difficult cases will no longer be referred to the founder in future. Without this clarification, the company will continue to enjoy a good conversion rate but fail to achieve growth.
2. Misconception: Delegating means handing over tasks.
Handing over tasks is easy. However, delegating means transferring decision-making authority. If this is lacking, micromanagement ensues: the task has been assigned, yet the founder constantly checks whether the employee entrusted with it is carrying it out as he himself would. There is a term for this: acting on behalf of someone else. Delegating, however, means that the person in charge is allowed to make decisions as they see fit – even if the founder would have decided otherwise.
There are two reasons why a misconception about delegating persists.
- Loss of control: Anyone who hands over responsibility loses control. I often see founders setting up an office for their sales team and moving into the room next door themselves, so they can keep an eye on what’s going on through the open door.
- Fear of decision-making authority: Genuine scope for decision-making is so rare that many employees do not want it. Anyone who announces that, with immediate effect, the team is authorised to decide on complaints up to 500 euros will often face resistance.
How can you dispel this misconception?
Delegation requires a defined mandate. Specify the extent of the responsibility and where the limits of decision-making scope lie: financially in terms of amounts, or in terms of content via guidelines. The model for this is the Highway Code: certain rules must be followed; no one may drive faster than the speed limit, but they may drive more slowly if the driver deems it appropriate. Based on this, the following should be defined in a delegation mandate:
- The area for which the person is responsible.
- The financial limit up to which they may make decisions on their own authority.
- The time periods for which they report. This reporting obligation replaces ongoing monitoring.
3. Misconception: Our best people should take on the most important cases themselves.
In the short term, this sometimes makes sense. In the long run, however, every difficult decision ends up with the same people. The growing experience of these top performers is not shared across the organisation, but centralised. The more special cases someone has dealt with, the greater the impression that this person is indispensable because they are successful. In customer service, for example, the experienced colleague handles complaints from particularly angry customers. Because they consistently find solutions, the conviction arises that they, and they alone, should handle such cases. It would be better if the top performer were available for coaching, knowledge transfer and feedback. Yet many regard this time-consuming investment as unnecessary. After all, the person resolves the complicated cases themselves.
Warning sign: When the better closer helps themselves
The acceptance threshold is crossed as soon as a top performer takes it upon themselves to take on the cases of a less successful colleague because they consider themselves the better closer. Although the deal is closed, motivation amongst the rest of the team plummets. This is another reason why staff turnover is higher in sales than in almost any other department: companies measure new employees against the performance of the top performer and replace them if they are deemed underperforming, rather than supporting their development. What many people forget is that every new hire is significantly more expensive than the development of an existing employee.
How can you rectify this misconception?
Simply increasing the workload of top performers does not work, as their capacity is limited in terms of both time and physical stamina. Scalability comes from knowledge transfer: what one or two top performers can achieve should, in the long term, be something that as many other team members as possible can also do to a similarly high standard. To achieve this, a combination of three measures is recommended:
- Personal coaching for the colleagues who are to take on the difficult cases in future.
- Standardised playbooks rather than individual working methods.
- Clear decision-making logic, defined and communicated to everyone in the team.
In many sales teams, everyone just gets on with their own work. The special skills of top salespeople are a kind of secret knowledge that secures them the attention of senior management. However, the aim should be for all team members to possess expert knowledge to roughly the same extent.
4. Fallacy: More growth requires, above all, more activity.
This assumption is so plausible because it is mathematically correct. A sales team of five people achieves a certain number of deals per month. If five further staff members are hired, after a training period of one to three months – depending on the complexity of the product – they will achieve roughly the same results as the existing staff. This proves the theory. But what about sales efficiency?
When asked how a company intends to grow, I often get the answer that they simply hire more people and do more of what they’ve been doing so far: more leads, more calls, more working hours. But: if the processes have so far led to sales but are not optimised for efficiency, the inefficiency of these processes multiplies with a larger sales team.
Inefficient processes become a brake on growth, because the administrative burden increases as a result of staff expansion. A team that starts with 20 people and expands to 100 to achieve the desired growth might have needed just ten additional staff if the processes had been better designed. And the administrative burden would have been correspondingly lower.
How can you resolve this misconception?
Do not focus primarily on sales activity, but rather on its impact. Before you generate more leads, make more calls or hire additional staff, you should understand what actually works within the existing system:
- Has the ideal customer been defined?
- Where are there friction points along the customer journey?
- Are Marketing, Sales and Customer Success towards common goals?
- How are conversion rates developing across the individual stages?
- And are the key KPIs tracked and managed centrally?
Only once you understand these interrelationships can you decide where scaling makes sense and is possible. Therefore, what should be scaled is what has been proven to work, and not simply ‘more’. Anyone who clings to the equation ‘more activity results in more growth’ risks spiralling costs and inefficient processes – and, as a consequence, unrealised profits.
5. Fallacy: A good leader makes themselves indispensable.
Anyone who is too heavily dependent on individual people loses their scope for action. The alternative model sounds paradoxical: A manager who makes themselves redundant as quickly as possible has actually achieved their true goal. If the organisation functions at least as well after their departure – ideally even better – then there has been genuine transformation.
As an interim manager, I made it clear at the start of each of my three assignments that I was taking on the role with the aim of becoming redundant as soon as possible. In many places, indispensability is seen as a sign of good leadership. Why? Because a single individual is overvalued: under their leadership, the sales department has performed well. So how is the company supposed to function without this top performer? Many managers know full well that they have influence and knowledge. They centralise power instead of building a self-learning organisation.
Anyone with top performers in their team can rest assured that performance will be up to standard and that targets will be met or exceeded. There is no reason to question the individual – or is there? Top performers often hinder the development of staff with potential. There may well be people in the team who would be better suited to a leadership role than the best salesperson. Yet they cannot develop because the top performer will hold the position for the foreseeable future.
How can you resolve this misconception?
Do not assess managers solely on the basis of short-term results. It is easy to increase turnover in the short term. But what about sustainability? To achieve sustainable turnover growth, you should select staff and assess their performance based on three criteria:
- The quality of results, not just their quantity.
- The ability to build a self-learning organisation in the medium term.
- The willingness to make oneself redundant in the long term in one’s own role.
The third criterion does not mean that the person is leaving the company: anyone who has made themselves redundant in their current role is a candidate for progression to the next level on the career ladder.
Behind all five misconceptions lies the same habit
Be honest: would your sales team function tomorrow without its top performers? In all five misconceptions, this question leads to the same way of thinking, a sort of ‘bubble effect’: the repeated confirmation of an assumption that isn’t entirely wrong. This is disastrous, because top performers do a great deal. But that is precisely the problem, because dependence on individuals continues to grow as a result, and the view of the organisation as a whole is lost.
Top performers should therefore be key function holders who can continue to develop and who, in a key role, should not be indispensable. In this way, a sales organisation can be created that achieves good results even without top performers. This is precisely what the concept of ‘Kill your Darlings’ is all about: not doing without people, but being less dependent on individuals. The task of senior management is therefore to
- translate the skills and knowledge of top performers into capabilities for the organisation as a whole,
- to delegate responsibility, including decision-making authority, and
- to multiply performance rather than centralising it further.
How dependent are you on top performers?
The glass ceiling that companies hit when they cling to individual top performers is barely perceptible from the inside. From the outside, however, it is often clearly visible. This makes external input all the more important – such as the following questions. They provide insight into whether and to what extent you are dependent on individual top performers:
- When was the last time your team solved a difficult case without a top performer being involved?
- How long does it take for a new recruit to come close to matching the results of your top performers? And what happens if they don’t manage it?
- Which management position in your organisation has been well-filled for years without anyone else developing alongside it?
As an interim manager coming in from outside to a sales organisation, I can operate differently to the existing management team. My assignment is time-limited. My objective is clearly defined. The results must endure beyond the end of the assignment. Achieving a rapid impact without creating new dependencies is therefore not a secondary consideration, but my actual task. I am a temporary high-performer, but I make myself dispensable. In this way, I am not a brake on growth, but a catalyst for growth.
