You started off the year right: rallied up your sales team, set a sales goal and worked with upper management to plan it out. For all your planning and motivational speeches, you’re still facing poor sales performance. So, why weren’t you able to improve sales performance?
You’re not cycling out bottom performers, causing sales performance to drop.
Keeping bottom performers on the team is much like allowing insects to grow unchecked in your garden. They bite holes in team morale, make reaching revenue goals harder, damage your company’s reputation and reflect poorly on your company culture. Come spring there will be little to harvest – unless you cycle your bottom performers out now.
You’ve created several sales strategies, but your sales team lacks proper training to act on those plans.
Whether it’s poor training or no training, bad sales training leads to bad results. Untrained sales reps function off what little knowledge they have about the team’s sales process, ideal target prospect, products and best practices. This lack of knowledge seeps into their interactions with prospects.
Your team has very little sales motivation or is demoralized.
Is it your company’s culture? Misalignment with marketing? Hoarding underperformers? Low morale can stem from many places in the workplace. Sales reps with low morale do just the minimum to get by, halting your company’s goal progress. It’s your responsibility as sales leadership to find the source, and fix it before rep retention drops.
You want to increase sales, but sales reps aren’t held accountable for following up with prospects.
According to a Salesforce article, “only 82% [of small-midsized companies] have a documented process for lead follow-up.” Following up is important. Having a dedicated process for making and tracking follow-ups is essential. If your sales team lacks a defined process for follow-ups, it means that follow-ups aren’t happening, that your team isn’t accountable and you’re costing the company money.
They need better prospect data to meet sales goals.
The old saying “the more, the merrier” doesn’t apply to sell to specific customers. Your company’s product has an ideal target customer, and that’s who sales reps should be selling to. Many sales reps, however, can’t or aren’t accessing the data they need to shop their products to the right audience.
With the right strategy and quick action, poor sales performance isn’t forever. It will simply be a hurdle your organization jumped over and were the better for it. For more information, check out our presentation.
