SALES MISTAKES: ROLE POLLUTION

When Your Best Salesperson Is Doing Everyone’s Job

You know that salesperson everyone depends on?

They know who to call. They know who sits on the board. They know which client is actually serious and which one just likes having lunch with them. They can find the right person at a company through three mutual connections, get a conversation going, close the deal, and somehow still know what’s happening with the account six months later.

They’re probably really good at their job. They’re also probably doing four jobs.

It starts with “Can you just handle this?”

It’s easy to see how it happens.

The salesperson is already talking to the prospect, so they’ll just update the CRM. They already know the account, so they’ll handle the follow-up. They’ve got the relationship, so they’ll manage the client after the sale. They’re the one who knows how to get a meeting with that hard-to-reach person, so they’ll chase down the next lead, too.

Nobody necessarily makes a big decision to structure the team this way. It just becomes the way things get done. And because the person is capable, it works. At least for a while. That’s what makes this problem so easy to miss.

The person who “always figures it out” can become the bottleneck

At a smaller or midsize company, being scrappy is a strength. You need people who can figure things out without waiting for a five-person committee to approve every move. But there’s a difference between being resourceful and becoming the person the entire sales engine depends on.

A salesperson might start the week intending to spend most of their time selling. Then they’re cleaning up the CRM. Then they’re trying to figure out who actually owns the decision at a prospect. Then an existing client needs something. Then there’s a lead that needs chasing. Then someone asks them for an update on three other accounts.

By Friday, they’ve been busy all week.

But how much time did they actually spend selling?

That’s the question leadership needs to ask.

Because “busy” can hide a broken sales function

This is where I think companies sometimes misread what’s happening. They see a salesperson with a full calendar and assume they need another salesperson. Maybe they do. But maybe the closer is spending hours doing work that has nothing to do with closing.

Selling is one function. Sales operations is another. Sales enablement is another. Account management is another. They can sit with one person for a period of time, especially when the team is small. The problem is pretending they’re still one job when the business has grown beyond that. And eventually, the cracks start showing up in places leadership can actually see.

The pipeline gets crowded with conversations that aren’t really opportunities. Close rates look unusually good because weaker deals never made it into the CRM. The best salesperson goes on vacation and suddenly nobody knows what’s happening with a major account.

None of those things are random. They’re symptoms.

Your “great relationship” might not be a buying relationship

There’s another version of this that shows up all the time, and it has less to do with job descriptions and more to do with what salespeople know about an account.

Someone says, “Oh, we’re really close with them.” Okay. But what does that actually mean?

Maybe your salesperson has lunch with someone at the company every few weeks. That person likes them. They answer their calls. They give them information. They’re helpful. That’s valuable. But are they the person who can move the purchase forward? Those aren’t always the same thing.

There’s the friend. There’s the person who gives you information but has no influence over the decision. There’s the internal champion who’s doing a lot of the selling for you. There’s the senior person who genuinely likes your salesperson and wants them to succeed but isn’t actually backing the purchase.

Those relationships can all feel like progress. They just carry very different weight. If nobody is mapping that out, the salesperson can spend months nurturing a relationship that was never going to get the company to a decision.

And then one person leaves

This is the part that should make leadership uncomfortable.

If one salesperson leaves and you suddenly lose the history of an account, the names of the real decision-makers, the context behind the opportunities, and the relationships that took years to build, you didn’t just lose a salesperson.

You lost part of the company’s sales intelligence. The information was never really owned by the business. It was owned by a person. That’s a very different problem.

We see something similar when a salesperson goes on vacation. If everyone has to wait for them to come back before anyone can understand what’s happening with an important account, that’s not a vacation problem.

It’s a system problem.

So don’t start by asking who else to hire

Start by asking a much less exciting question: What jobs are actually being done right now, and who owns each one?

Name them. Selling. Sales operations. Sales enablement. Account management. Then look at the reality, not the org chart.

Who’s updating the CRM? Who’s qualifying opportunities? Who’s finding and nurturing new leads? Who’s managing the relationship after the contract is signed? Who actually knows the relationship map inside the account? You might find that one or two people are carrying almost all of it. That doesn’t automatically mean you need four new hires.

Maybe some of the work can be delegated. Maybe some can be shared. Maybe some shouldn’t be happening at all. Maybe the person who’s best at closing simply needs to stop spending their best hours on work someone else could own.

The fix can be much smaller than the problem makes it feel.

Your sales team might not be understaffed. It might be blurry.

That’s the distinction I’d make before adding another person to the team. Because if your best closer is also your CRM manager, lead researcher, account manager, relationship historian, and unofficial sales operations department, hiring another closer doesn’t necessarily solve the problem.

It might just give you another person working inside the same blur. Growth eventually forces you to separate the things that were once allowed to overlap. The question isn’t whether your salesperson can do all four jobs. Clearly, they can. The question is whether they should still be doing all four if you’re asking the business to grow.

Because eventually, “they can handle it” stops being a compliment. It becomes the bottleneck.

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