IDEA: Always hire great salesmen regardless of the organization chart.

Hire the great sales candidate who is revered by his clients. When you run across an extraordinary candidate, do not hesitate to hire him.  Do not miss the opportunity to increase the overall level of your sales staff. There will always be good, mediocre and lousy sales personnel as measured by their sales or gross profit margins of their companies assigned to them. You must line all of them up by gross profit margins and see who is on bottom. Those bottom earners need to improve or be replaced. Regularly measure the number of customers, sales dollars and resulting gross profits by sales person.  Do this frequently and then cut off the lowest earners. Because you have hired more than you thought you needed, you will be covered with the other great candidates now kicking in new sales.  Do not waste your time keeping poor performers too long because you are short of sales staff. When you do finally  let them go without a replacement,  you have customers that get no service  or poor  attention for months. When you finally do hire someone, it takes that person many months to bring the sales area back to budget levels. Always be looking for and hiring great sales personnel regardless of your need.