The question that I really wanna ask you is because you've led a lot of different teams in different environments and have had a lot of successful teams that you built out, I have no doubt that you've had your fair share of underperformers. How do you deal with underperformers?

S1

Speaker 1

00:16 - 01:54

The biggest challenge you have as a leader is to figure out why they're underperforming, what the problem is. And, the best way to do that is through coaching.

So the first place you look when you have people who are performing, it's are they hitting those KPIs or tables or whatever a business wants to call them, but the 3, they're the 3 or 4 things that a seller has to do to be successful. And so if you find out they're doing those things and yet they're still not being successful, then it's incumbent upon you as the sales leader.

And usually this is the first line sales leader. If you find it, this, this person, this individual is hitting all of their metrics that you felt were important to do it.

Then a lot of what you have to do is going to involve direct contact with that seller, going out and visiting customers with that seller and having discussions about those visits at the each visit. If you develop a culture of coaching, you can give constructive coaching to the individual.

When you look at all those metrics, if you can look at them and be really thinking constructively about how they can improve those tangibles, then you wanna talk to the individual about what they're doing long. What many sales leaders don't do is get involved to the detailed level, why they're not making those metrics.

And then when they do get involved, they don't provide proactive coaching because what's important is that that individual has to face up to what they're doing wrong, typically to to try to progress them to become a performer.

S0

Speaker 0

01:54 - 02:10

Anecdotally, just in conversations with leaders, I could say they're probably not doing this because the feedback I get from candidates is they've been told, you know, or coached out.

But the words you use or the tones you use, like how important is that?

S1

Speaker 1

02:10 - 04:29

You know, words are important, but the frequency of coaching is I think the critical factor.

I wasn't the kind of sales leader that looked to try to demean you. What I would like to do is just to talk about where you're doing well, where you're not doing well.

And if you're not making your number, it's a problem. And you need to know that it's a problem.

Sales leaders are funny. You know, one of the things they don't, most people don't make their quota. Like if I'm a sales manager, it's gonna be hard to make my quota if I don't keep a full staff.

So I can't have a lot of attrition and I can't be fired a whole lot of people. A lot of sales leaders will, permit underperformance to relax and just continue along their way because maybe they believe they've got some over performers that are going to cover up for them.

I never thought that was a good idea. I always thought that what you needed to do is to build up a funnel of potential candidates that you could always go to.

And so you're not, reluctant to have that tough conversation with your underperforming salesperson. So the idea that you go out with a salesperson and they do a whole lot of things wrong, and you say, oh, it was a pretty good call.

Yeah. You, you may wanna be able to think about doing this and doing that the next time. No, you can't do that.

You have to say, you know, the call was really bad. Okay.

That was not a pretty good call. Call was really bad.

You got to set the tone really upfront. The call was really bad.

I was disappointed that you let these things take place during the call. It doesn't appear to me that...