Managing Underperformers to Sales Success

Most sales teams are overflowing with underperformers, from those who are consistently far below quota to those who meet quota but could be performing on a much higher level to some of the top salespeople who haven’t reached their full potential but who just can’t seem to find a way to step up another notch or two.

All of these underperformers are costing the company money—even those top salespeople who have reached a plateau they can’t seem to climb above. Lost sales, wasted training dollars, discontent and anxiety, and turnover are just a few of the serious issues associated with underperforming sales teams.

Traditionally, managers have focused their attention on those salespeople who are not meeting quota, allowing those who are performing at a minimum acceptable level to continue without being challenged to stretch themselves, to maximize their performance. Most managers are concerned about production quotas and goals, not maximizing the performance of each individual on their team.

Time is partly to blame for this focus on only those salespeople who are not meeting quota. But it is hardly the only factor. In reality, it’s not the primary factor.

Managers concentrate only on the non-quota achievers simply because they don’t know how to help their salespeople fully develop their potential. That isn’t an indictment of managers—most have never been given a process to help develop their team members. The average sales manager uses ‘motivation,’ the carrot of a reward, extra sales training in the form of sales books, tapes, or seminars, and anything else they can think of to get their bottom dwellers to reach quota, including the ultimate weapon—the threat of being let go.

Yet, it is the responsibility of every sales manager to work to get each of their team members to reach their maximum potential. It’s their primary responsibility. In a very real sense, it’s their only job.

Nevertheless, how do you get team members to maximize their potential if you don’t know how to do it?

Here are four ways to get the process started:

1. Like any other salesperson, manager, or executive, sales managers need a coach. The coach should be someone who not only can give guidance and encouragement, but someone who has been where they have been and knows how to get the most from each member of the sales team. In other words, the coach has to be coach, trainer, motivator, disciplinarian, and confidant. Hiring or having the company hire a coach for you who knows the process of how to develop sales talent and can help guide you through the process should be a priority.

2. Whether you have a coach or not, sit down with each member of the sales team and help them create a comprehensive sales and marketing history of their past year’s activity (or any other reason time frame—the longer, the better).

Reconstructing their history will not be easy and it will be time consuming. Give them guidance in how to construct it, review their progress and give help as needed, but have them do the actual research and reconstruction.

Once the history has been reconstructed, work with them to develop their actual historical ratios—their closing ratio, their marketing ratios, all of their sales ratios. The more detailed, the better.

Once the ratios have been developed, look for patterns that show where they have been successful and where they haven’t. A salesperson’s sales and marketing history is a key to discovering how they can radically improve their sales business in an amazingly short timeframe. Without a solid history, it is impossible to make logical, realistic and significant changes in the way they do business. In order to make changes based on reality instead of guesswork and hope, they must know how and why they’ve gotten where they are and why they aren’t where they want to be.

3. Have each team member take a quality sales assessment. Use the information from the sales history and sales assessment tool to help each salesperson identify their individual behavioral and personality traits, as well as their sales skills.

Each salesperson has their own unique behaviors, their own personality and their own set of developed sales skills. Sales skills can be learned, changing one’s behavioral and personality traits is difficult, if not impossible. Yet with a thorough understanding of their strengths and weaknesses, you can help each salesperson find those markets and marketing methods and the sales process that caters to their strengths and minimizes their weaknesses. Once one has aligned the way they do business to maximize their individual strengths and minimize their weaknesses, prospecting, marketing and selling becomes natural, their success soars, and their self-confidence and job enjoyment skyrockets seemingly by magic.

4. Again from the analysis of the salesperson’s sales history and the sales assessment, establish an individualized training program that addresses their sales skill needs. Most companies and managers try to give ‘universal’ sales training. Everyone will get X training. Everyone read X book. Everyone go to X seminar. Not only is that an ineffective use of time and resources, it is self-defeating. Training only works when it addresses a need and where the individual being trained recognizes the need. Forcing salespeople to take training they don’t need or don’t believe they need is futile. Far more effective in terms of dollars and time invested—and results, is training that is geared toward the specific needs of a specific individual. The initial dollars invested in each salesperson may be more, but the return will be many times what the traditional training approach produces.

Developing your sales team’s full potential isn’t easy, nor is it without a great deal of effort for both the salesperson and you. If it were easy, there wouldn’t be vast numbers of sales teams staffed with underperforming salespeople. Because it takes time, money and a good deal of commitment and dedication, few managers and companies will make the investment. However, those that do will see tremendous returns. Not only will they increase their business, they will have a sales and management team with new life and vitality that will seep throughout the rest of the organization.

Finding a comprehensive process to help you or members of your sales team work through their sales business in a logical, systematic process to discover where they are strong and where they need to make radical changes to their business isn’t easy. As a matter of fact, the only comprehensive guide I know of is contained in my just released book SuperStar Selling: 12 Keys to Becoming a Sales SuperStar which is available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and all fine bookstores.