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A Phil Hall Op-Ed: In the media world, the salespeople who are tasked with bringing in paid advertisers are an invaluable part of the organization – after all, without their work, companies would be sorely lacking the revenue needed to keep their operations afloat. But throughout my career as a media professional, I’ve found myself in companies working alongside salespeople who were utterly incapable of doing their jobs in something that could be mistaken for a competent performance.

I’m not trying to be funny or snotty in making that declaration – their ineptitude was genuine. While in some cases their bumbling was coated in sincerity, in other cases these folks went about with an air of insouciance while moving from one debacle to another. The one thing they had in common was that they either brought in the barest minimum of advertisers or nothing at all.

Yet the biggest problem I’ve I encountered with these less-than-stellar salespeople came from the people running the companies – they were not the least bit disturbed by this dismal work. At one company, the person tasked with advertising sales failed to secure any company to advertise in one of our publications. When I asked the publisher if he found that result acceptable, I was not given an answer.

At another company, the publisher was cognizant of the dismal work of the salespeople but shrugged off their lack of effort by acknowledging, “They always go after the low-hanging fruit.” In both cases, I tried to help the salespeople by pointing them to contacts at companies that expressed interest in partnering with our publications, and in both cases my efforts to assist were rudely ignored.

And what ultimately happened to these companies? One of them wound up being sold for pennies on the dollar and the other enacted layoffs and hired cheaper and less qualified workers – though, perhaps not surprisingly, the bumbling salespeople kept their jobs.

Of course, my experience is in the media industry. Still, I am curious to know if this carries situation carries over into the real estate industry. Most media salespeople, not unlike their real estate counterparts, rely on commissions to make a living. And one might imagine commission-driven would work aggressively to get their clients. But is this always the case?

I would think that the National Association of Realtors’ settlement regarding commissions would have been a wake-up call for the less productive members of the real estate profession to re-evaluate their performance outputs. Or maybe the initial panic generated by the settlement was replaced by a business-as-usual environment?

Thus, I would like to open this into a dialogue among the readers of this column – you can share your input in the “Comments” box below this text. My questioning is simple: How does your company deal with agents and brokers who chronically underperform? Is this type of performance greeted with a shrug, or do the underperformers ever get a shape-up-or-ship-out talk to ratchet up their results?

What has been your experience in dealing with agents and brokers who don’t perform at a level where they should be? Please share your experiences below.

Phil Hall is editor at Weekly Real Estate News. He can be reached at [email protected].

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