Your sales team needs a performance boost. How can you leverage individual feedback to make it happen?

Personal feedback is crucial for enhancing performance. By identifying an employee's strengths, weaknesses, and the challenges they face, I can offer tailored suggestions for improvement and provide support to facilitate their progress. Witnessing their own development will motivate them and lead to better performance.

Listen to your folks on the ground. Sales leaders get caught up in the numbers and rely too much on that classic metrics formula as if it were a foregone conclusion that X calls always results in 1 close won deal. We love that formula because it's easy. It's also false. Why? Because it's based on past data, typically the past 2-3 years, and the current sales climate is nothing like it was in 2021-2022. Really listen to your reps. Demand activity but hear their feedback too. Adapt your goals to the actual reality of 2024, not a dream of 2021's zero interest buying world.

This is how I see that individual feedback contributes to increasing performance. One-on-one dialogues really add to team members' openness in investigating what can be improved and finding ways to experiment with new approaches. Feedback might help them fine-tune their next steps. In addition to identifying areas for improvement, self-acknowledgment of good performance is at least as important. Being able to see and acknowledge what goes well creates a healthy foundation for new initiatives to further improve. Creating an open dialogue in which the team member feels genuinely listened to supports them in feeling more confident in tackling obstacles they come across on the way to boosting performance.

In my experience, sales leaders in this scenario should consider four actions: 1) Each sales leader of a team should meet 1:1 with each sales team member to have an open discussion around what is working, what is not, ranked order areas of focus, and what elements of the 1:1 can be shared with the greater team. 2) The sales leaders collect, process & roll up a team summary that reflects the spirit of each of the team members and considers this along w/overall company objectives. 3) Each team meets collectively to discuss and memorialize the areas of focus to improve, and develop an agreed upon cadence to assess progress. 4) The team meets regularly after initial meetings to assess, and then amplify what is working and amend what is not.

Managers need to have detailed analysis of individual performances. It helps to segregate low performing areas of any individual. This will give direction for one to one discussions where managers can share how part. Once their way forward is aligned then managers can have sessions to discuss progress on the milestones decided during one to one sessions.

Hopefully, a good sales manager has continued to coach and work with each individual in the team. But when there is a performance issue across the team, it's possible it may be less attributable to what each individual is doing, but a common issue/problem everyone faces. For example in may be certain skills/training, it may be changes in the market, etc. It's important to understand these and work to correct them.