At a Glance

• Equipment finance hires and promotes salespeople for proxies — relationships, product knowledge, tenure — and assumes the ability to win complex, competitive deals comes attached. It doesn’t.
• Winning is a specific, developable capability: reaching the decision-maker, navigating a multi-stakeholder process, framing structure against the customer’s actual priorities, and competing without surrendering to rate.
• The capability rarely gets built because the industry treats selling as an innate trait, provides no curriculum, and lets servicing crowd out the reps that would develop it.
• The result is a bench that depends on a few naturals, a long tail that plateaus, and origination capacity capped well below the firm’s ambition.

Hired for Proxies, Judged on Winning