When Revenue Drops, the First Reflex Is: “Let’s Hire Sales.”

Recently, a business acquaintance called me. Revenue was down. Pressure was rising. You know, the classic symptoms.
I asked her some simple questions to find out what the numbers actually said.
I didn’t suggest anything yet but she ended in silence.

She made her own analysis: margins were thin. Positioning unclear. The offer had slowly drifted. Delivery was inconsistent. The sales process wasn’t defined. Conversion wasn’t tracked properly. And customer churn quietly did its thing. She acknowledged that, looking at the social media of the company.

I asked her what she planned to do about it.
She answered: “Let’s hire a salesperson asap?”

This is a pattern I’ve seen more times than I can count.

When numbers go bad, companies often assume the problem is at the top of the funnel. “We need more sales.” What they often need is clarity, focus, positioning, product-market alignment, operational consistency, pricing discipline, or simply fewer distractions.

A salesperson is not a magician.

And time is key. If the business is already bleeding, you don’t have time for a 3 to 6 month ramp-up while the new hire figures out what exactly they’re supposed to sell and why customers hesitate.

By the time they are fully effective, the runway is often already gone.

In the case I mentioned, we dug deeper. The issue wasn’t lack of sales capacity. It was rather structural:

• The company had slowly lost focus.

• Too many small custom adaptations.

• No clear pricing logic.

• No consistent margin monitoring.

• Decision-making bottlenecked at the founder.

• Strategic drift disguised as “opportunity.”

• and some other things I forget...

No salesperson fixes that. Hiring sales in that situation is like buying a bigger bucket while the boat has holes.

Yes, sometimes you genuinely need more sales capacity. But when revenue drops suddenly or consistently, the first move should not be recruitment. It should be diagnosis.

Where exactly is the constraint?
Only after that particular question is answered, hiring makes sense. I’ve seen companies hire three sales people in a year, fire two, demoralise the third, and still not fix the core issue. The real problem was almost never sales effort. It was strategic coherence. If your numbers are declining, resist the reflex.

Before posting the job opening, ask the uncomfortable question: Is this really a sales problem? Or is it a decision problem upstream? Because if the structure is wrong, more sales pressure simply accelerates the collapse.

And no salesperson deserves to be thrown into that.

If this sounds familiar, take a step back before you take action. Decisions made under panic are expensive. And bad for your health.
And hiring the wrong solution is often more expensive than the original problem.

#My2Cents