Your best salesperson just had their worst quarter. Do you have a performance problem or a coaching problem?
Most sales leaders in promotional products can't answer that question with data. They rely on gut feel, quarterly revenue numbers, and hope that next month will be different. But Dickron Kherlopian, Senior Vice President of Sales at commonsku, knows exactly how to tell the difference—and it starts long before anyone misses a target.
With nearly two decades scaling sales organizations across SaaS and financial sectors, Dickron has a track record that speaks volumes. Now he's bringing that systematic approach to the promotional products industry, and the timing couldn't be better. As distributors plan for 2026, the gap between those who manage sales teams strategically and those who wing it is becoming a chasm.
We dive into:
Forget "tell me about a time when you overcame adversity." Dickron's found something better.
He asks candidates to pick something they're genuinely passionate about—fantasy football, sourdough bread, vintage motorcycles, anything—and then pitch him on it in 30 seconds. Then he objects. Hard.
"If you can't talk about something that you care about and convince me to care about it, how are you gonna convince me to care about a piece of software?" he explains.
The brilliance? You can't prepare for it. You can't rehearse a canned answer. It reveals how someone thinks on their feet, handles objections, and communicates under pressure—the three skills that actually matter in sales.
Here's what he's learned: mediocre salespeople are exceptional at two things. They're masters at convincing their manager that next month's pipeline looks better than this month's (survival instinct), and they're phenomenal at interviewing because they do it constantly.
Meanwhile, top performers might stumble through behavioral questions because they're too busy crushing quota to practice interview techniques.
The promotional products industry has a particular blind spot here. We get seduced by charismatic personalities and smooth talkers, assuming they'll translate to sales success. But Dickron looks for something different: conviction about wanting a career in sales, analytical thinking under pressure, and obsessive organization.
"The one thing that you can never train into somebody is the ability to problem solve on the fly," he notes. "They come with that already."
For promotional products professionals used to business development and account executives, the SaaS world can feel like alphabet soup. SDRs, BDRs, AEs—what does it all mean?
Dickron breaks it down simply: someone has to curate interest at the top of the funnel. You can't just yell in a parking lot and hope someone buys. Marketing departments use sophisticated tools to generate hand-raisers. Sales Development Reps (SDRs) or Business Development Reps (BDRs) often nurture those meetings. Account Executives (AEs) close them.
But here's what matters more than titles: understanding where to invest your most expensive resources.
"You want your highest paid people closing deals," Dickron explains. In enterprise sales, if an AE procures four leads and closes one per quarter, that's excellent ROI. For smaller deals, that math doesn't work.
The promotional products parallel? If you're selling a million-dollar account but only working with their marketing department, you're leaving money on the table. What happens when you collaborate with HR, purchasing, and operations? The account multiplies.
It's not about org charts. It's about intentionally designing who touches what parts of your sales process.
Dickron lives in dashboards. He obsesses over metrics. But ask him what makes a great sales leader, and he'll tell you something unexpected: accurate stories behind the data matter more than the numbers themselves.
"Things are never as good as you think they are. They're also never as bad as you think they are either," he shares, quoting a former mentor. "If you don't know the story behind the data you'll never understand why things are happening the way they are."
Here's where it gets practical. When a rep's numbers drop, most managers ask, "What happened?" Dickron digs deeper. He compares closed-lost reasons from period one to period two. He examines whether deal velocity changed. He identifies patterns invisible to surface-level observation.
Maybe timing-related losses increased. Why? The macro environment didn't change. The product didn't change. Something shifted in how that rep qualifies opportunities or sets next steps.
Armed with specific, indisputable data, coaching conversations become productive instead of defensive. A rep can't respond with "It was just a tough month" when you're showing them concrete evidence of behavioral changes.
For promotional products distributors tracking gross sales but ignoring gross margin, average order size, and customer lifetime value, this is a wake-up call. You can't manage what you don't measure, and you can't coach what you can't see.
"You need good dashboards," Dickron insists. "What's coming in? How much of it are we winning? When we win it, how deep are we selling into that relationship? How long does it take us to do so?"
Interestingly, shorter sales cycles aren't always better. If a rep only closes quick, simple deals because they can't navigate complex, higher-value opportunities, their metrics look efficient but their revenue potential is capped.
Early in his career, Dickron made a classic mistake: assuming everyone wanted what he wanted. More responsibility. More challenges. More success.
A mentor corrected him: "One of your biggest tragic flaws is that you always assume everybody wants more responsibility and more success and more work. Maybe you do but not everybody does."
Through managing hundreds of salespeople, Dickron identified three core motivators: more leads, more money, and career progression.
A sales team can temporarily tolerate when one of these isn't working. But when two or more falter? They're unhappy, and performance tanks.
This has profound implications for 2026 planning. If you're setting aggressive growth targets, how are you addressing each motivator?
More leads might require attending additional industry events or investing in marketing. More money means examining compensation structures. Career progression requires creating development paths that don't just exist on paper.
The promotional products industry often struggles here. Many distributors are founder-led, with the owner trying to download themselves into their successor. It's understandable—that approach built the business. But cloning yourself limits what's possible.
"Distributors have one similar parallel to a founder-led startup," Dickron observes. "The founder or owner CEO salesperson number one is often trying to download themselves into their heir apparent. From their point of view that's what's been successful. So it's very easy to see why you would wanna just simply clone that instead of getting super creative with it."
As distributors finalize 2026 plans, Dickron's advice is deceptively simple: make a plan.
Not a wish list. Not a revenue target plucked from thin air. An actual plan connected to real operational changes.
"If I have X amount of opportunities last year, I won X percentage of them. I got this much revenue from each one and thus it ended up landing me at whatever revenue I did," he explains. "So if I want to improve my win rate maybe I need better presentations, maybe I need a higher quality prospect, maybe I need a better human that's actually delivering the pitch."
Want to expand your prospect pool? Maybe you need to attend more events. Okay, what's that cost? Does that expense justify the increase in top-of-funnel demand? If you maintain current win rates—or improve them—what does that translate to in bottom-line revenue?
The critical insight: nothing gets better on its own. Win rates don't improve without better training, processes, or people. Deal sizes don't increase without product expansion or deeper customer relationships. Sales cycles don't shorten without removing friction from your buying process.
"Those things will not get better on their own unless you're actually making business changes that correlate to them," Dickron emphasizes.
And you can't do this in a vacuum. Get stakeholders involved. If you're in promotional products, that means coordinating with operations on capacity, with finance on cash flow implications, with product on what new offerings enable larger deals.
Every part of the plan needs to connect to something that makes operational sense. You can't just slap 30% growth on last year's number and hope determination carries you there.
Brian Halligan, co-founder of HubSpot, once outlined three phases of sales leadership: the starter who can hire a few reps and close deals, the solver who figures out rep profiles and builds process, and the scaler who rallies troops, collaborates with senior teams, and masterfully adjusts compensation, territories, and channels.
Dickron embodies that third phase, but with a crucial caveat: "It makes it sound a lot simpler than what it actually is in real life."
It takes mistakes. It requires patient leaders who let you learn. It demands quickly reversing course when something isn't working. You can't just step-function your way to sales excellence.
As you plan for 2026, the question isn't whether you'll set aggressive targets. Everyone does that. The question is whether you'll build the systems, develop the people, and make the operational changes that turn those targets from aspirations into inevitabilities.
Your best salesperson might have a terrible quarter next year. When they do, will you have the data to understand why, the coaching framework to address it, and the systems to prevent it from happening again?
That's the difference between managing sales and leading a sales organization.
[00:02:17] Applying SaaS principles to sales
[00:03:53] The three traits that predict sales success
[00:08:45] Interview questions that reveal true selling ability
[00:12:07] Data-driven performance management
[00:18:49] Using AI to extract insights from historical data
[00:19:13] Coaching philosophy: creating space to breathe
[00:23:23] Time allocation: where to invest your coaching
[00:29:08] 2026 planning: connecting targets to real changes
[00:30:42] Cross-functional collaboration for hitting goals