Is the move to double the salesforce the right way to solve a marketing problem?

In the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal, a local medical company has a first page article with the headline boasting how they are doubling sales staff for a rebound. Within two paragraphs my worst nightmare comes true, they use the dreaded nine letter word when talking about sales people, MARKETING. "The new hires will focus on marketing..."

Following, I break down why this decision is less than ideal.

3 Reasons Why Using Sales People to Solve a Marketing Problem is a Bad Idea 

1. It's way too expensive (Topgrading, HBR)

Look at the 30 new hires through this lens:

• 24% of all the candidates won't prospect (Dave Kurlan, The Objective Management Group)
• 45% of the salespeople will be ineffective at closing (Dave Kurlan, The Objective Management Group)
• 90.8% of sales meetings do not result in a sale (Harvard Business Review)
• $1,760 profit is needed per sale to cover the cost of failed sales, assuming the average sales call is $163 (Harvard Business Review)
• Less than 50% of reps are forecasted to make quota (CSO Insights)
• 9 months is the average ramp up time for a sales person (CSO Insights)

Of all these news hires:

• less than 15 will most likely make quota
• 22 will not prospect for new opportunities
• 14 won't be able to close
• 9 out of 10 sales/marketing calls won't result in new business
• 9 months is the time they will need to carry the sales team before they start to produce results

If you go directly to this company’s website it's a nice site, but the company is nowhere to be found when you actually query the types of problems most people are searching for that this company could solve. The volume of queries for the top twenty long tail keywords for problems they solve is north of 1,000,000,000. And to convert a fraction of that traffic it would be cheaper to hire an entire inbound marketing firm than a single salesperson. In fact, most inbound marketing firms could be retained for less than the cost of one sales person. In turn, the sales ready leads could be fed to the top performers.

3. It’s not aligned with how buyers are making purchase decisions

A better share of the buying process is completed online before ever speaking to a sales person. This being the case, this company should be working to create demand instead of unleashing a pack of sales people. Buyers no longer systematically chip away at which brand they would like to buy. Instead, most buyers engage in channels outside the control of the business. Yet, when you evaluate this company’s online marketing mix, they have little to no presence online aside from a brochure-like website.

Some Things to Noodle:

1. What would this company have to lose if they tried a less traditional approach to solving sales problems?
2. Are their potential customers sitting back waiting for a sales person to call, or are they most likely doing confidential research to find the answers to their questions?
3. What if the company hired in a 1:1 ratio of marketing vs. sales?

We'd love to hear how you might solve this problem.