How Sales Leaders Can Avoid Common Pitfalls That Lead to Team Underperformance

Are your leadership standards inadvertently setting the stage for underperformance?

If you are a sales leader or sales manager, you may be making your job more challenging by tolerating behavior you should not. When you accept negative behavior and low standards, your team will deliver that. What is worse, the bad behavior will spread unless you do something to prevent it from harming your results and theirs.

You want high standards when it comes to everything. Whatever you tolerate becomes your standard. You would do better to have high standards, causing your team to improve how they do everything.

Preventing Low Sales Performance by Avoiding Tolerance

1. Prospecting: If you tolerate individuals or teams that go days or weeks without prospecting, you are in trouble. When you tolerate reps failing to prospect, you will soon have more team members giving up prospecting. One company had senior reps who were allowed to manage their clients, never making calls. The junior salespeople looked to the senior reps, and decided not to prospect. You must not tolerate a lack of prospecting.
2. Negativity in Sales Teams: Negativity is the only cancer that spreads to others. You must combat it. If you tolerate negativity, you will find that others are becoming as negative as patient zero, who was the first to be infected. If you tolerate one person being negative, soon you will have more negative people. Once I watched a single person turn an entire team negative, causing them to quit one by one. The sooner you notice a person becoming negative, the sooner you can explain that you will not tolerate negativity.
3. Sales Preparation: Sometimes a salesperson decides not to do the preparation required of sales professionals. There are some salespeople who are good on their feet, improvising instead of approaching the work like a craftsperson. If you tolerate reps that don’t do the research and reading before sitting down with a client, others will stop doing the preparation that would improve their chances of winning. Once on an airplane, a sales leader told me that he only hired salespeople who were “crisp.” I didn’t need to ask him what crisp meant, because I was looking at it. You should not tolerate lazy salespeople who want to coast along doing the bare minimum.
4. CRM Usage: First, let us agree that the CRM is not Big Brother, but instead, it is a record of your organization’s relationship with your contacts and clients. If you tolerate sales reps not using the CRM, you accept that you will not know important information that you will need in the future. Information spanning weeks, months, or years is valuable and is worth capturing in a place that you can easily find it after you forget it, which will inevitably happen. If you tolerate reps who don’t take notes, you agree to give up having crucial information and insights.
5. Ineffective Email-Only Prospecting: Recently, I heard a story about a team of SDRs who only email their prospective clients. These salespeople don’t want to make phone calls, and the sales leader allows this practice. By accepting an email-only prospecting strategy for booking first meetings, the manager is setting their team up for failure. It is important that you understand that some of your competitors will pick up the phone—or worse for you, walk into your client’s facility. Anything you don’t want to do, your competition will do in your stead. To lose an opportunity, it only takes one competitor to show they care about the client more than you do. If you tolerate an email-only approach, you will find yourself with too few opportunities.
6. Sales Methodologies: Ever so often, you will hear a salesperson say, “I have my own style.” It is okay to have a style when we are talking about clothes, but not when it comes to how the salesperson sells. If you tolerate salespeople who don’t use a methodology that creates the value the buyers and decision-makers need, you are risking the sales rep’s opportunity. You must choose the methodology your team loses to prevent them from losing when winning would be possible. You should not accept or allow a rep to sell however they want to.
7. Ethical Standards in Sales: A few weeks ago, one company told me that their competitor offered to pay the leader $7,500 for their business. The leader not only rejected it, but also disengaged. They also called their headquarters to report the bribe. The competitor had at least three people who took the bribe. Once you tolerate unethical behaviors of any kind, you will have lost everything. Never do anything unethical. If your own principles aren’t enough, know that word of your behavior will spread and others will think less of you.
8. Continuous Learning and Development: If you accept salespeople who do not continually learn and develop, you ensure that they cannot improve their sales effectiveness, the most important initiative. If you tolerate salespeople who believe they are perfect just the way they are, you will have failed them by not holding them accountable for growing on your watch.

Conclusion

Sales leadership is always challenging, as your results are made up of your team’s performance. I had a CEO with high standards. Once I walked into a lobby and there was a tiny piece of paper on the floor. She chastised me for not picking it up. How you do one thing is how you do everything.

You can expect that anything you tolerate will become the standard, even something like picking up a scrap of paper. Your team will never have higher standards than yours. If you are a salesperson, raise your standards. If you are a sales leader, raise your standards and don’t tolerate anything that lowers them.

Do good work, and I’ll see you here tomorrow.