Have you ever kept failing at something when it felt like you should be winning? It’s maddening.
Golf comes to mind. Sometimes your whole swing feels perfect – the target is aligned, everything about the swing is smooth – yet the result is consistently awful. Then someone finally, thankfully, points out that your poor grip is what’s causing you to push every shot.
While no one enjoys hearing about their bad habits, each revelation comes with inherent hope. In the case of our golf swing, a bad habit was identified so that a good habit – a new club-gripping routine – could theoretically lead to fewer duffed shots and better scores.
If your sales team has been missing quota (or even if it hasn’t), you might be able to identify a few correctable culprits.
5 Habits That Cause Sales Team Performance to Suffer
Small changes can yield big results. Here are five tendencies to watch out for, along with a helpful redirection you might advise in each case.
Chasing Numbers
Ironically, chasing quota too hard can contribute to missing it. Such is the case when a salesperson focuses too hard on pushing final-stage deals past the finish line. In doing so, they may be creating distance between themselves and the contacts who aren’t quite ready to close. Simultaneously, this same rep could be ignoring key relationships in the earlier stages of the pipeline, thus delaying or risking those deals as well.
The point is, over relying on any single metric will lead you astray more often than not because that’s the behavior most salespeople will prioritize, even when they know it’s shortsighted.
Build This Habit Instead
Use a variety of sales pipeline metrics and KPIs to tell the story of each rep’s performance. Encourage each sales rep to do the same when evaluating their own performance. Look past quota attainment to determine whether or not each rep is focusing on the right people, accounts, and activities. In doing so, you’ll be able to better tell who’s getting lucky, who’s primed for a breakout, and what’s needed in terms of individual training.
Going It Alone
Particularly in B2B selling, going it alone works against reps in multiple ways. First, when there is only one established relationship at an account, sellers are essentially asking their key contact to go it alone on the vendor’s behalf. This rarely-if-ever works in an age when many buying committees have double-digit members.
With this many voices involved, it also becomes trickier for a solo salesperson to establish and build relationships with all relevant buying committee members. It’s possible, but it’s rare to find a sales pro who can easily connect with all types of buying roles and personalities, especially without the benefit of a warm introduction from their colleague or peer who may have an “in.”
Build This Habit Instead
Make teamwork procedural by identifying experts your sales team can routinely lean on to align with, connect with, and build relationships with key contacts at the account. Similarly, provide the necessary education and incentives to your internal experts so they’re properly trained and motivated to step in whenever they’re needed. If your team uses Sales Navigator, train reps on taking advantage of TeamLink so they can identify opportunities for warm intros via mutual connections.
Lastly, make sure each team member is trained to understand the importance of reaching the full buying committee, along with how to go about it.
Spending Too Much or Too Little Time on Social Media
To be clear, spending too much time with social isn’t an actual problem when you regularly reap results from it. Yet in reality, it’s pretty easy for a sales rep to visit a social media site only to discover that an hour or so has passed and they haven’t accomplished anything close to their original objective. Repeat this exercise multiple times per week, across multiple reps, and you have a time suck of epic proportions.
Build This Habit Instead
First, try to integrate the most sales-centric aspects of social media with your CRM, thereby eliminating the need to visit social sites to gather basic data. Second, encourage your team to build social media time into their calendars. For instance, a reps calendared “appointment” with social media in the morning might be allocated to prospecting, whereas a different “appointment” with social media might focus on finding insights among mid-stage prospects. Ideally, each appointment would include the exact steps for the rep to focus on, right within the calendar invite.
Also, set up social media feeds so they’re ultra productive. Regularly follow and unfollow people and companies so that feeds are as relevant as can be, every time you visit. Reps can start customizing their feeds by following some of these sales experts.
Discontinuing Education
Harkening back to our golf swing example, it’s quite normal for golfers to play horribly when they show up feeling like they’ve got the game figured out. Like with golf, no one completely figures out sales, or plays every meeting perfectly. But it is possible to get pretty darn good and reach an elite level.
Even at the pro stage, golfers employ swing coaches. Likewise, sales professionals should embrace education no matter how accomplished they are. It’s the only way to ensure your team is maintaining the most effective skill set while also making sure you’re not slipping into new bad habits.
Build This Habit Instead
Just like you’d schedule time for social media, build educational time into each team member’s calendar. For best results, personalize the educational experience by allowing team members to choose which skill they’d like to build (with your help, of course), or which impactful sales book they’d like to read. Then, be sure to track performance as it relates to what they’re focusing on.
For example, if you’re training a team member on how to reach more members of the buying committee, you might track something like “connections-per-account” a little more closely so the rep can see that their efforts are working, increasing motivation for future educational opportunities.
Selling What Isn’t Wanted
Understandably, many salespeople get caught in the trap of feeling like they need to sell themselves and their product before a buyer will consider moving forward. While technically true in most cases, the actual order of how everything works tends to get flip-flopped.
Build This Habit Instead
What prospects actually buy into is a seller’s approach to solving their problems. Hence, it’s important for sales team members to hold off on selling themselves or the solutions until they’ve identified that there’s actually a problem, and it’s worth solving. Until this has happened, a sales rep can only sell the product or themselves because they lack context for how they can actually help.
Monitor reps a little more closely during onboarding and during the early stages of key deals to make sure their focus remains where it belongs: entirely on the prospect. Once sales pros see firsthand that focusing wholly on the prospect and their problems is a more natural and preferred way to sell themselves and their product, they’ll start to auto-recognize when they’re focusing too much on themselves and not enough on the prospect.
Harnessing Healthier Sales Habits
The nature of bad habits is that we sometimes mindlessly repeat them without much thought. This is one area where a sales manager’s input can be valuable and welcomed. Always make sure to approach these conversations with a gentle touch, and a clear recommendation.
When sales reps focus on the right objectives, work collaboratively, use social media purposefully, stay open to education, and put the buyer first, they’re likely to make winning a habit.
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