We had a client, a language school: its head of sales became unavailable, and the conversion rate almost halved. The CRM system was still there, as were the meeting recordings. Even a dedicated quality control employee was still working.
At the first meeting, the request was clear: they needed a strong head of sales who could get the team performing. There was a good flow of incoming enquiries, the team was small, and they were planning to hire more salespeople. Under strong leadership, the conversion rate had stayed high. So they needed to find someone who could make that happen again.
I understand that logic. They had already achieved results and associated them with a particular head of sales. But what stands out to me here is quality control. There was someone to monitor the quality of the salespeople’s work. Why was that not enough when the head of sales became unavailable?
Feedback to a salesperson still needs to become action
I believe that having a dedicated quality control employee in this situation creates a dangerous impression: someone is watching over the team, so management is continuing. Yet spotting a mistake, deciding how to correct it and making sure something changes in the next conversation are different actions. Someone has to carry them out, even if all the feedback has already been written down.
This is no reason to blame the school’s quality control employee. The drop in the conversion rate alone tells us neither how good their feedback was nor what authority they had. For that, we need records of their work: what issue was found, who it was passed to and what decision followed. If the feedback is accurate but no one then assigns the salesperson a task, reviewing more recordings is pointless. There will be more feedback that no one acts on.
If a task has been assigned, the next question is different: who checked that the salesperson put it into practice? An acknowledgement only shows that the person has read the text. What is needed is the next conversation, showing an attempt to correct the specific mistake. If the requirement has been met but buyers still say no, the requirement itself needs to be examined. Putting more pressure on a salesperson for following an instruction is a poor way to find the cause.
That is the work we need to look for behind the previously high conversion rate. Who chose which points of feedback were actually worth addressing? Who explained to the salespeople what to change? Who distinguished between a failure to follow instructions and a poor decision by the head of sales? The CRM and the recordings provide material for these decisions. They do not make them on their own.
The next head of sales needs the reasons behind the requirements
Restoring the head of sales’ work should start with what the company still has. Open the meeting recordings and deal tasks from before the conversion rate fell. Find the requirements given to the salespeople and the reasons for them. In this case, the recordings exist, so there is no reason to start by buying another tool.
It is easy here to mistake a detailed archive for a completed handover. A meeting recording preserves the whole conversation. To continue the work, the next head of sales needs to identify the decision made: what the salesperson was required to do, why that particular action and what they planned to look for when judging the result. Without this review, the successor will get hours of conversations and have to work out all over again what matters in them.
To begin with, it is enough to reconstruct three areas:
- Daily deal reviews: which deals the head of sales chose to intervene in and what they wanted the salesperson to do for each one.
- Requirements for salespeople: which action was mandatory, where evidence of completion could be found and what happened when the same mistake was repeated.
- Disputed client cases: what decision was made, on what grounds and who had the authority to make it.
These are areas to investigate, not a claim that none of this was recorded at the school. We are interested in the boundary: how far the remaining employee can continue the work and at what point they need a personal explanation from the previous head of sales. That is the gap that needs to be closed. There is no need to rewrite the entire CRM just to make the CRM more detailed.
At the same time, there is no reason to keep every old decision forever. The next head of sales has the right to change a requirement if they see that it gets in the way of a sale. They need the reasons behind the previous choice so they can make an informed decision about changing it. Otherwise, a useful rule and a habit that arose by chance will be dropped with equal confidence.
You will still need to find a strong head of sales
Documents will not run a review with the salespeople tomorrow morning. So hiring a head of sales and restoring their work need to happen in parallel. While the search is under way, the owner will have to appoint someone who makes daily decisions on deals and ensures feedback is acted on. Simply directing all questions to the quality control employee is not enough: they must have the time, the authority to assign tasks and the ability to lead people.
The new head of sales’ task should be defined more broadly than restoring the conversion rate. They take on daily management and immediately make their work accessible to the next person: recording decisions, reasons and unfinished tasks. The owner decides who is allowed to take over this work and which decisions require the owner’s involvement. Access to the CRM alone is not enough.
A practical check is to hand one daily review over to this person. The current head of sales remains available but does not guide every action. Can the person standing in choose deals, explain the requirements to salespeople and resolve a disputed issue within their authority? Wherever guidance was needed, knowledge has yet to be passed on. Where the decision is clear but the person is not allowed to make it, authority needs to be addressed. These are different reasons for work coming to a stop.
Such a handover does not yet prove that the conversion rate will recover. It shows an earlier result: someone else continues to make daily decisions, and the team follows them. The commercial result will have to be assessed separately. The school was planning to expand the team; before doing so, it is worth finding out who will review the new salespeople’s work, so that each additional employee does not increase the workload of the sole head of sales.
At RENTROP, turnkey sales management includes handing over decisions and current tasks when the head of sales changes: the next person needs to know what work to continue. A free sales review can examine precisely this reliance on one person: what will stop in your sales department when the head of sales is unavailable.
The school really does need a strong head of sales. But the hiring brief is missing one requirement: the work they do so well must remain in the company beyond their time in the role. Otherwise, the next search will once again begin with a request to find someone who can carry the whole team on their own.