How To Fix Sales Performance Problems

The first step is to identify the sales performance problems and then look at those in a holistic way. Sometimes organizations and sales execs get so caught up in the day-to-day operations that they overly focus on one area or another and don’t take a step back to get a sense of what is happening within the sales organization; meaning they never get to the root cause of the problems.

When we look to identify the root cause we try to keep it focused in three areas: strategy, process & people. These are the three areas that need to be assessed in order to get a sense of what is going on & what needs to be fixed.

It’s important to keep strategy very simple. Focus on a few core things such as the value proposition (Is it clearly defined? Can it be articulated by the sales team to the clients?). Once it is defined, you can then figure out which customer you want to be working towards – who do you want to go after and is the customer going to value your value proposition? You need to keep things targeted on those who are likely to buy; the shotgun approach no longer works.

Process & people are the more challenging areas. Process comes down to execution – how will you reach the customers you want to reach? The first step is to look at the sales structure and the end-to-end sales process, as a lot of organizations overlook alleging this process with the customer’s buying journey. Also important is to align the sales process with marketing process – which leads are you generating & how are you selling to them?

When looking at people there are typically two prominent issues: skill deficiency & motivation caps. Once you have your sales processes defined and you know how you’re going to market, you have to be sure that you have the right talent in the right places. You have to determine which reps have the skills necessary to execute your strategy and base their role on that. Another issue with people is management. Is your management team driving performance and motivating employees? Are compensations aligned with desired behaviours? All of these also drive performance.