Imagine army troops trying to take a hill from the enemy. At the top of the hill, the opposing soldiers sit in a fortified pillbox loaded with machine guns. As your soldiers charge up the hill, the enemy mows them down. 

Wave after wave of soldiers are sent. Finally, the soldiers overwhelm the enemy and they take the hill. But at what cost? Was it worth it?

Hamburger Hill was the slang name for an actual campaign fought in Vietnam in 1969. The sad irony of this battle was this hill held no strategic value, and the American soldiers abandoned the site after a few days after winning it. This became a Hollywood movie and a metaphor for a failed, pointless military tactic.

Today, too many companies are sending their new hires up Hamburger Hill. What’s different today? What’s changed in 20 years?  Why do so many new hires fail, and what can we do about it? New hires, especially young ones, are battling three dragons:

There are far more product and service lines. When I was hiring salespeople in the 1990s, we had essentially two products. One simple, one complex. Nowadays, it’s not uncommon for salespeople to have over 20 products on their line card, and an equal number of services. It’s overwhelming to have to learn all these new technologies.

Company computer systems, CRM systems, and vendor programs are more complex. We used to turn in orders manually, often hand-written. Now, it takes hours to create Bills of Materials, Vendor Registrations, Scopes of Work, and more just to create an order. Then the fun begins again as you enter the information into ConnectWise, Netsuite, Hubspot, or SalesForce.

Building a funnel from scratch is time consuming in the best of times.  Post Covid-19, it’s even harder. Door knocks are mostly out. Customer events and conferences are all virtual, making it harder to make new connections. It’s harder to get prospects on the phone* see table below.*

You still need to grow your sales team, but do it the right way. Start your people on Inside Sales, learning the administrative tools and helping process orders. Once they’ve got the process down, start training them on the products and services, so they have some idea what the heck they are selling. Third, and finally, ease them out of the nest gradually into outside sales.

The secret to winning Hamburger Hill is to avoid it. Avoid sending new, untrained people up a hill to get gunned down. Instead, work on giving your senior salespeople more selling time and better selling opportunities. You’ll get your sales growth, but it will come from your existing team, not your new hires.

Owners and Sales Leaders complain “nobody wants to work anymore” and “you can’t find good hunters”. Balderdash. It’s not the hire, it’s the hill.

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