Fixing Your Sales Team: It Starts with People

Hello and welcome to the show. Today we're going to be looking at the common causes of sales team performance decline. That is just a very academic way of saying that we're going to look at the reasons why sales team performance goes down. And we have been leading up to these to these reasons, these issues from yesterday's episode and I think the episode the day before where I told you guys that we're going to look at people related issues, excuse me, process related issues,

market related issues and organizational issues that causes your sales team performance to go down. Now my aim of doing this is that by identifying what the root causes are when your sales performance, the performance of your sales team declines, we can all come up with targeted solutions to improve the results. So today we're going to be looking at people related issues for why your sales are going down. And we're going to be looking at things like lack of motivation because that's one of the reasons why your sales people are not performing well or not selling well.

Poor leadership because sometimes you are the cause for why your sales team is not selling well. There's also sales talent shortage. You don't have right people on the team. Then there's also a high turnover. So that means your sales team is suffering because people keep leaving. Whether it's high performing people, high performing people are leaving, or whether it's low performing people are leaving. But either way, if you have,

let's say, 5 sales people at any given length of time, and then in January, 2 people leave, you replace them in February, so they're five again, well, then in February, one more person leaves, you replace the person in March, and then they're five again. But you can see how not having a stable core crew of sales people is going to affect how it is that you're going to be able to sell, how you're going to be able to move merchandise in your business.

So we're going to examine a few of these reasons today. Now, lack of motivation and lack of morale and all these sorts of things can be a factor, can be a number of you can be caused by different things. Sometimes it's because the goals that you have for selling are not clear. Sometimes it's because the incentives are not good enough, whether it's the money or the terms of the terms of employment. Sometimes it's because people are going through burnout.

Sometimes it can be because of a negative work environment, and sometimes it can be because of poor team dynamics. So you might have somebody who is a high seller who is not a team player, and the person doesn't bother to teach people or encourage people in how to sell well. And it can cause all kinds of all kinds of dynamics. And then for the poor leadership, it could be because you as the business owner or you as the sales manager, you have a weak management style or you don't provide them adequate support, you don't provide them adequate coaching.

And sales talent shortages are just it's essentially difficulties in hiring and keeping talk people around. So let's run through a couple of these and see what to do about these subsets of problems. Because remember the main problem that we're trying to solve is you might be in an organization or you might own a business where your sales performance is going down. And we have looked at some of these people related issues that are causing the sales performance to go down.

So what can we do about these sorts of things? Now on the clear ghost thing, one way of sorting out this problem is we just need to make sure that all I put it, it's not enough to just say good morning boys and girls, happy new month. This is January 1st. So go ye forth and sell. That's that's not that is not sufficient direction or guidance on how people are supposed to go about selling. It'll be best if you have activity based conversations when it comes to goals or revenue based conversations when it comes to goals.

I'm not going to go into the debate of which is better, but just know that these are alternatives, these that are available to you. So if you show up on January 1st and you're saying happy new month team this month, it would be nice if we can sell, bring in 200 million in annual revenue. Now, whether that figure is realistic or not, you can see that at least this is a specific goal that you can start planning towards that you can track towards.

So back when my little cousin was in banking, you know, these are some of the things that she was faced with because, you know, they would sit down at the beginning of the year and then the branch manager will say annual goal this month is so, so and so hundreds of million and blah, blah, blah. But The thing is, if you now tell people that our annual branch goal is, you know, 800 million, then people can now plan. Like, OK, if the annual goal is 800 million, then I should be bringing in this X amount of 1,000,000 per month.

So daily I should be looking at this, weekly I should be looking at this. You can see that having a clear goal gives people the ability to plan. And for you, who is the business owner or the sales manager, you can also help people plan accordingly as well. Now there are some people who like to do things on the activity based end of the spectrum and that is where I fall. I'll make podcast episode about that later where you're tracking the activities that people do.

So you're thinking, well, of course numbers are always behind activity based planning at the end of the day. So you might look at your previous activity, maybe last year you guys did maybe 10 M in revenue and you realize that that 10 M was because you guys had 20 clients or something of that nature. And then with that, you're going to be able to reason backwards and say that, OK, if we want to do business with 20 people at the end of the year, we should be speaking to X number of people per month, which is X

number of people per week and which is X number of people daily. So in that case, you're not going to be able to track the activity of your sales team to say that, look, if we're going to hit our end of year goals, you guys should be talking to at least 5-5 customers every day. Out of that 55 customers you're talking to at the end of the week, if we do a good job, each of you would have brought in three, three customers.

If each of you are bringing in three, three customers, then this is how much we're going to be doing per month. This is how much we're going to be doing per quarter, this is how much we'll do per year. So these are ways of going about it. So there's the revenue target. This is the amount of money that we should bring in at the end of the year. And then you plan backwards or you say that if we're going to hit our money goals, these are the number of people that we should be talking to, the number of proposals that we should be issuing or the number of house office or office visits that we should be doing, the number of proposals that we should be sending out.

You take some activities and then you start tracking it to make sure that your people are hitting those metrics. Now there are some difficulty when it comes to activity based goals because it's easy for people to just send emails for the sake of sending emails. So if yes, say you give them a target of you should be emailing 10 proposals every day, then people can just start emailing proposals to every Tom, Dick and Harry, whether they might be a good potential customer or not.

So yes, there are those dangers, but we can get up. We can talk about those dangers and how to avoid them in future partners episodes. But for now, just know that as the business owner or as the sales manager, it's not just enough for you to show up on January 1st and say happy new month. You know, go ye forth and sell. Let us bring in progress. You have to have much more detailed and clearer conversations. You can have the conversations around activity.

So team members, happy new month. This is these are the activities that I expect you guys to carry out for this week, for this month so that we can hit our quarterly goals, our annual goals, blah, blah, blah. Or you have a revenue goal and say happy new month, guys, remember for this year, 2024-2025 or whenever you're listening to the podcast, our revenue goal is blah, blah, blah. So this month we're expected to bring in this and this and this and that.

Then that's on clear goals. So for burnout and bad work environments, you know, people are being toxic. And then burnout. Burnout is when people all I put in, they lose their motivation, they lose their bluster, and they lose connection with the job that they're doing. This is not something I can talk about on the podcast because bad, because bad work environments and burnout, toxic work colleagues, things like that. These are actually management problems and this is beyond my skill set because I'm not a management consultant.

I just focus mostly on sales and the business development side of the journey. So if you're figuring, if you're having these sorts of problems that you want, you need help figuring these these things out, you shouldn't be talking to me. You should be talking to a management consultant. So check your LinkedIn, your Instagram, your whatever. You should find a couple of people that you should be able to have those conversations with and they'll help sort you out.

Now, bad leadership, yes, that is also a management problem, but it's an easy problem to solve when you are the business owner, because the problem is bad leadership. There's nobody else that you can point to. You're the business owner or you're the you're the sales manager. So the problem is all about you. So this is an easy problem to solve because if I'm talking to you, there's nobody else who has responsibility. So you're where the buck stops.

So we have to sit down, knock our heads together and figure out how it is that we're going to solve the problem. So leadership problems, it's all about you, the business owner or the sales manager. And there are factors that we can tweak, that we can change easily to change the outcomes. The reason why I can't address management problems is because management problems are about structures and about incentives and structures and incentives.

These are not easy things to navigate unless you are a specialist. So you know where it is that you're going to tweak. So if bad leadership seems to be a problem, then within your organization, then we need to tackle these leadership issues head on because this is low hanging fruit. So since the problem is with you as the leader, as the owner, as a sales manager, we can easily change one or two things to affect the overall sales performance.

So how do we cure bad leadership when you are the problem? First of all, don't take it personal. Nobody is perfect when these things come up. Just think of it as self improvement, as a self improvement challenge. Don't think of it as recriminations from your staff. Now, I know that this is not easy, and I'm also speaking about this from personal experience. It's not easy when you're in business with people and people are pointing their finger at you saying that you are the bottleneck, you are the clog.

So when that happens, don't assume that this is a coup and people are trying to blame you for everything or hoist you out or things like that. Just look at it as a personal development challenge and that no one is perfect. Let us see if there's a kernel of truth in whatever it is that the sales team or other members of staff are trying to say. So for poor leadership, for weak management, for things like that, one of the solutions actually is care delegations and follow through on whenever we agree that we're going to do something.

Because sometimes the problem is just that you're doing your best to be the best leader that you can and you come up with inspirational and well thought out activities that people are supposed to do. But The thing is, what you're saying makes sense, but then you don't delegate properly and you don't follow through, you don't follow up on agreed action items. And so that is why things don't get done. So one thing that I've noticed dealing with Nigerian business owners, for instance, is that a Nigerian business owner is usually in the habit of saying something like somebody should handle the XYZ account and you just leave it like that.

You say that during the meeting. Now, what you have said is actually correct. As the business owner, somebody should pay attention to this XYZ thing. And if somebody does pay attention to the XYZ thing, yes, the sales, the sales performance is going to improve for the business. However, standing up in the middle of a team meeting and saying what is wrong with you people? For God's sake, somebody should handle this XYZ account.

It is not the same thing as saying when you when you're in the meeting. It's not the same thing as standing up in the meeting, looking directly at one person and then saying, Dorothy, I think this should be part of your responsibility. You should look into the minutes of this XYZ account, give me a list of outstanding action items, and then get back to me Wednesday morning on what you think we should do to move this thing forward.

Now the 2nd way, this latter way is more specific and it prevents this situation where all of you come back Wednesday morning and then you're not having to shout at everybody again because nobody met the standards. And the problem is you didn't clearly communicate the standard. So for Nigerian business owners, please, this is something we need to work on because it's something that I've seen, it's not just something I've seen in Nigerian business, it's something I've even seen in my family.

You know, when we sit down, we're trying to solve family problems. You know, an uncle will stand up and shout and everything and that somebody should do this, somebody should do this, somebody should do this is not the same thing as saying you Kunle or you die or go and investigate. 123456 get back to me Friday morning on what it is that you think we need to do to solve this problem. It's a totally different thing. So to solve these leadership problems and the league management problems, we need clear delegation and we need clear follow up or clear follow through.

I prefer to say follow through on agreed upon action items. So we should learn to be specific on these ones. So dear business owner, dear sales manager, yes, your idea is brilliant. The problem is lots of times you're standing up during the weekly, monthly meetings and you're shouting at everybody, but you haven't given anyone in particular responsibility for doing something. At the moment you start giving people responsibility, there's going to be accountability around certain things and you see that the improvement, sorry,

your sales performance is going to improve. So let's see for the sales hiring and the training sorted shortage. There's no need in stressing that again because that's the purpose of this podcast and we go over that from time to time. So just listen out for future episodes if you're new to the show. And of course, if you've been listening for any length of time, you already know the episodes where I dealt with these sorts of things.

Or you can just use Listen Notes, that is LISTEN and then notes NOTES, it's a website that catalogues different websites. All you have to do is look for my podcast there in Listen Notes. It allows you to search within the episodes for where I spoke about these sorts of things. So if you just pull up Listen Notes, you find my podcast and you hit the search function and then you search sales hiring. Every single episode that I have done around sales hiring for because we're currently at over 900 episodes now, it will go through all the 900 episodes and it will give you those episodes where I spoke about sales hiring anywhere I spoke about sales training, it will give you those episodes.

So that's also another cool way to use this podcast. You can use it as a learning resource. The episodes are out there for free over on the Internet. Use listen notes, catalogue all this and you'll be able to get your learning done. That's if you're not one of those people who likes to just binge because I know some people who listen to the podcast because they come once in a week and then they binge on stuff. You know, since I'm putting out on average maybe like three to five episodes every week.

So now, OK, there are other things we can look at process related issues. We've gone through people. Then there's process related issues, market related issues, organizational related issues. I think what we'll do is we'll continue with that tomorrow because I've noticed that a lot of the episodes I've done in the past 2-3 weeks, I've been 30 minutes episodes. I've even done I think 240 minutes episodes. And yeah, as much as some of you like here, my voice, I'm trying to be considerate of your time.

Let's not take up too much of your time. So tomorrow, we will continue with process, market and organizational issues and then we will see what we can be done about them to improve sales performance. So that is all for today. Please connect with me on WhatsApp. The phone number is 08064662140. The country code is +234. For those of you who are not Nigerian, also connect with me on LinkedIn. My name is Tavi Shima Ayede, you can confirm the spelling of my name so you can search for me the right way on LinkedIn.

You'll also get my e-mail address from the link where you're currently listening to this episode. Thank you very much for your time and attention. I will catch you at the next episode.