Are you frustrating your sales team performance? If you are a business owner or sales manager you could be doing so due to poor sales management practices. Here are four ways how that can happen and what to do about it.
Setting unrealistic expectations
Setting unrealistic expectations is the fastest way to burn out your sales team. The Wells Fargo scandal is perhaps the leading example of this. Purely to inflate stock prices, management set the unrealistic goal of 8 accounts per customer. Industry average was at 2.8. Setting ambitious goals can motivate a sales team, but when those goals become unattainable, they can do more harm than good. Over time, constantly missing targets erodes confidence and leads to disengagement.
Read: For predictable revenue set clear sales goals and targets
Promoting on sales performance not skill
“He’s consistently surpassing his targets and creative in his approaches to selling. Like attracts like. So. let’s promote him; put him in charge of a team. He will replicate himself across his team and the promotion will motivate and reward him.” Sound and logical as the idea is, in practice it fails flat. Top sales performers rarely make good managers. In fact, promoting them doesn’t facilitate their performance. It frustrates it. And frustrates the sales team performance too.
‘Blessed’ in selling but ‘cursed’ at leading the novice sales leader, not knowing any better continues to sell and give out his accounts to his team members. In the short term it works. Quickly though, it becomes evident that it’s not sustainable. An emotional and physical drain to him and his team members manifests. Business owners and sales managers, thinking ease of scaling, can frustrate their sales team performance by killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
Read: Making salespeople into CEOs or sales managers might not help firms
Rewarding on tenure not performance frustrates their sales team performance
Another common pitfall is rewarding tenure instead of performance. In many organizations, long-serving employees are given promotions or bonuses, regardless of their recent contributions. This approach can demoralize high-performing salespeople who feel that their hard work is being overlooked. “He’s our top earning salesperson and our longest serving salesperson. He’s way ahead of the pack. Truthfully though, he’s not earned it. We gave him an existing portfolio of already performing accounts and he’s reaping from that.”
The result? Imagine a top-performing salesperson who consistently exceeds targets, only to see a colleague with lower results receive a reward simply for being around longer. This can lead to resentment and decreased motivation among your most talented team members. “Why try harder?” they reason. “I’ll just do bare minimum to survive long enough for him to exit and ‘inherit’ his portfolio. That’s how things work here.” If you have an existing database of customers, have a service team manage it. The customers are after all the institution’s not the salesperson’s.
Lack of Recognition: The Silent Demotivator
Recognition is a powerful motivator, yet it’s often overlooked. A study by Gallup found that only 26% of employees strongly agree that the feedback they receive helps them do better work. For salespeople, whose success is often tied to numbers, lack of recognition can be particularly demoralizing. Imagine closing a significant deal after months of effort, only to receive a generic “Well done” email, or worse, nothing or, “Where’s the next one? You’re only as good as your next sale.” Without proper acknowledgment, sales teams can start to feel like cogs in a machine rather than valued contributors.
Read: Money is not a silver bullet to motivating sales people
Conclusion: Frustrating sales team performance
Support your sales team to boost performance. Frustrating your sales teams performance isn’t just about poor management—it’s about failing to recognize and address the unique challenges they face. Unrealistic expectations, lack of recognition, rewarding tenure over performance, inadequate training, and constant strategy shifts can all contribute to a demoralized and underperforming team. As a business owner or sales manager, it’s your responsibility to provide the support, resources, and recognition your sales team needs to succeed. So, ask yourself: Are you rewarding tenure or performance—and how is it affecting your sales team’s motivation and results?
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