Barbara Corcoran: How to Hire Like a Shark
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Barbara Corcoran on her system for firing salespeople who are dragging down the company.

Barbara Corcoran:

Barbara Corcoran is the CoFounder of Barbara Corcoran Venture Partners. Her credentials include straight D’s in high school and college and twenty jobs by the time she turned twentythree. It was her next job that would make her one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the country when she took a $1000 loan to start The Corcoran Group. As one of the “Sharks” on ABC’s hit TV show, SHARK TANK, Barbara has ponied up her own money and invested in twentytwo businesses, competing to make those deals for all to see, then shepherding them to success. Her newest book, SHARK TALES, takes you behind the scenes of her life and business and her ‘seen on TV’ venture capitalism. Barbara is famously brash and blunt, bold and courageous, and a brilliant identifier of opportunity and talent (often invisible to others).

TRANSCRIPT:

Barbara Corcoran: Nobody’s happy doing what they’re not good at. You want to get a great job you love? Do something you’re good at. When a salesperson isn’t producing they’re not happy. And so you must have a system to make sure that they can move on to something that’s gonna make them happy. In the real estate sales field only one in four salespeople ever succeed at selling enough to even meet their overhead. So in my business I needed an ironclad system to make sure I had an exit strategy for every single wouldbe salesperson who didn’t have the talent. So what I did is fire 25 percent of my salesforce every year, because we needed to move them out and make the desk available to take another shot at someone who might really be talented in sales.

I never fired a salesperson who didn’t love me for it, because I allowed them to move on to something potentially that would make them happy. When you have a sales organization with unhappy salespeople as a large percentage of your population, it drags down the energy of the company, drains your financial resources, and so you can’t take care properly of the salespeople at the top.

So you’ve got to come up with a firing system that always happens and the reason it has to be a system is the very managers that are great at hiring are terrible at firing. Nobody’s good at it. Nobody wants to do it so you have to make a system of doing it. My system was simple. I ranked every salesperson from the top producer to the bottom whether I had 50 people or 500 people and always the bottom 25 percent were not making it. And so you must have a system where it’s mandatory that if people are not making it that there’s a system for dismissing them after a period of time of trying like crazy to help them.