The Five Basic Reasons Why A Salesperson Underperformed.
It is always easy to blame one person or several people for the
failure of a sales process or the failure for the whole sales
team within a company. Sometimes those people are just symptoms
of a different problem. Perhaps a greater problem. Though it
easy to find fault, it requires honesty to determine the true
causes of sales process failure. There are only five causes to a
sales process problem.
There are only five distinct areas that cause the
underperformance.
1. Organizational or Systemic problems can crush the sales
process. This cause of failure has very little to do with the
salesperson but more the company as a whole. Some examples would
be; production failures, antiquated paperwork system, service
issues, flawed products and the list can go on and on. Remember,
failure doesn't always point to one individual but many times
the whole company or a time consuming procedural process could
take up the majority of the salespersons time.
2. Obviously lack of skill will harm the sales process within
your organization. Skill does not mean that a person can or
cannot perform; but rather were they taught to perform. A
classic example of this would be if a salesperson encounters an
objection and doesn't handle it effectively causing a lost sale.
This very well could be that the salesperson was never taught
how to handle the objection and leverage it into a sale.
3. Leadership can destroy a perfectly good sales team. If a
sales team fails to perform at the desired levels but never knew
what the desired results were; how can you find fault with the
sales team members? This failure points back to the leaders or
coaches of that team. Many times sales managers are the direct
reason the sales process fails.
4. Attitude is such a simple belief that has the power to make
or break the sales process within your company. Attitude simply
boils down to; does the salesperson want to do their job? Many
times the best training, best companies and best coaches can not
overcome a person that simply has issues and will always find
reasons why they do not want to perform.
5. Now suppose you have gone through your sales process and
determined that the attitude of the team is fine, there aren't
any systemic problems to speak of, the training program is world
class and the best coach in the business is running the sales
team. Then the issue really boils down to the most simple yet
hardest to determine fact; the salesperson lacks the ability to
perform the job as needed.
Remember the five causes: Leadership, Organizational/Systemic,
Skill, Attitude and Ability. When failure happens within the
process level or all the way down to the individual level it is
one or a combination of those five reasons. By being honest and
assessing where the failure is happening you have taken a large
step in correcting the true disconnect.