Reality Check - 10 Mid-Year Sales Performance Questions Every CEO Should Ask Themselves

It is halfway through the year, is your sales organization healthy?

Assuming you are in a calendar sales year, it’s an ideal time to assess the health of your sales organization. If you catch potential problems areas now, you still have time to make adjustments and have a positive impact for the second half of the year. 

Answering these 10 mid-year sales performance questions will help you understand the health of your sales organization:

1.     Are your sales flat or declining?

2.     Is your sales team finding enough new opportunities to allow you to hit your goal?

3.     Is your sales team focused on NEW accounts rather than just relying on existing ones?

4.     Are deals stuck in the pipeline with little movement?

5.     Do you feel the sales team has a sense of urgency to hit goals?

6.     Are you experiencing heavy price pressures because your salespeople struggle to sell value?

7.     Are you over-reliant on a few reps?

8.     Are you losing salespeople, especially your key players?

9.     Do you have the right team in place to achieve the expected results?

10.  Are your sales leaders doing anything to drive accountability or make the sales team better?

If the answers to these questions have you concerned now is the time to take action, but what action? Is it sales training, changing out people, adjusting compensation, or one of a number of other areas that impact the health of a sales organization?

Sales is a complex thing. There could be many reasons why the sales organization is not meeting expectations. At Pivotal Advisors, we like to take a more holistic look at sales to diagnose where the issues might be. We have identified six Sales Performance Factors that impact the sales performance success of your organization:

Growth Strategy – Is it defined and do the salespeople understand it?  We’ve talked to hundreds of salespeople across hundreds of companies, and I can tell you that this is a big area of weakness across many of them. Many times the salespeople are not clear on whom to call on that gives them the best chance to win. Instead, they chase anybody that will talk to them. Additionally, when they do get in front of prospects, they are poor at differentiating their product or service from the competition. Is that because they are bad salespeople? Maybe, but it also may be that the company has done a bad job defining this for them.

People – Yes, it’s true that companies make bad hires. That may be because we hire based on industry knowledge or a book of business we believe they can bring rather than hiring for specific skills.  The best companies define what skill sets they need and interview to those skill sets.  Do we want hunters or farmers? Should they be good at following up on leads or generating their own? Do they know how to sell the premium products that cost more or are they good at selling the low-cost product?  It is important to define that we are hiring the right people. Then, when we do hire them, do we have a good system for getting them up to speed and productive?

Sales Process – Is there a repeatable, consistent process that all sales people can execute or are there just a few good performers that have all the best practices in their head? We find this happens a lot with smaller companies who eventually get stuck because nobody besides the owners and a few reps can sell.

Measurement – Are there goals around the things that lead to sales as opposed to just measuring sales alone? Using data and measurement to diagnose performance and coaching opportunities is critical to both accountability and performance management.  Without it, a sales leader will struggle to determine why a rep is underperforming and therefore it is harder to help them.

Rewards Systems – Are there things we are doing to drive the right behaviors? Some of that could be the misalignment of sales compensations with what we want them to do (for example – we want them to chase new accounts, but pay the same for new accounts and existing accounts). However, many times it is simple recognition and reinforcement of the things we want them to do. If we sit down each week and check to see if they hit their goal for new prospect appointments, salespeople will most likely hit their number. However, if we never check and never recognize those activities, there is a good chance they won’t hit their goals or metrics.

Execution – Does the sales leader set the right expectations and hold people accountable to those expectations? Does he/she provide coaching and feedback to the salespeople to make them better? Do they communicate well and make adjustments when needed? Do they reinforce strategy and make sure people are following the process?

Your team will most likely underperform if any one of these six Sales Performance Factors is off

These six Sales Performance Factors work together as an integrated system for driving the behaviors that lead to improved results. As one is modified, you need to consider the impact on the others. The better aligned the systems; the more clearly sales reps will understand what is expected of them and how best to get it done.

At Pivotal Advisors, we strongly suggest that you take a more comprehensive and holistic look at your sales force before you make your next move.

About the Author: Michael Holland is a Senior Consultant at Pivotal Advisors, a national, sales improvement firm dedicated to helping CEO's, Owner, Sales Leaders, and those people responsible for driving sales performance in their organizations.

Michael has over 20 years of experience selling and leading sales organizations in the Technology Market where he has been a key contributor at Verizon Business Solutions and MCI.

He has a wealth of knowledge with a strong background in business transformation underlined by successfully creating top performance-driven organizations. He led, coached and developed successful leaders and teams across the enterprise, commercial, SMB, and global markets.

At Verizon, he gained extensive international business experience leading organizations in Asia, Latin America, and Europe.

Michael helps leaders hire the right people, surround them with disciplined systems and processes and implement them through strong sales leadership to create teams that sell more, profitably, predictably and effectively.