Your Best Salespeople Are Hiding Your Biggest Problem

You know the ones I’m talking about. Every sales team has at least one or two. The high performer who exceeds their target every quarter. Whose pipeline is always robust, whose closing skills are almost miraculous, and whose results you’re always comparing everyone else to.

Every time you hire, you look for someone who can match what these high performers do, and most of the time you’re disappointed. Whatever you do, those superheroes are out there shaking hands, making friends… and mending the gap between everyone else’s projections and your actual numbers.

They’re so good, they don’t even have to follow the rules. And that is part of the problem.

Because High Performers Perform, Leadership Assumes the System Works

You’re looking at one or two salespeople who are killing it out there, and thinking the average and below-average performers are the problem. Some people are succeeding, so the others should be able to as well.

You look at those high performers and try to understand what they’re doing differently. They’re logging more calls, going to more events, befriending more decision-makers. And so you set targets for the rest of the team. More calls. More events. More people skills, maybe.

And you’re so busy trying to fix the average salespeople by demanding more activity that you miss the actual problem: You.

You Might Be The Actual Problem

I know from experience. In my early days as a sales manager, I would hire and fire, hire and fire. I thought the problem was poor work ethic, bad skills, salespeople who weren’t trying hard enough. But the real problem was me. I wasn’t giving them what they needed.

You’re so busy trying to fix salespeople by demanding more activity that you miss the actual problem: You.

I brought in salespeople who had done well in another environment, then plopped them down in mine and handed them:

• An unclear strategy
• Almost no formal process
• Generic training
• Overly complicated tools
• And, at the bottom of it all: Weak leadership

That was me. I knew that when I was selling, I could hit targets. I figured someone else should be able to do that too. But I had never articulated the strategy behind what I was doing, let alone the process I was unconsciously following. I thought I could send new underperformers off to a week-long sales training program, and they’d come back with the missing skills, but I wasn’t giving them the structure or the tools to actually execute on the training, let alone the management and coaching to hold them accountable.

Your Highest Performers Are Hiding the Weakness In Your System

Because a few salespeople do so well, you assume that your system works. Average performers struggle, and get blamed for it. But what those high performers are doing isn’t just more activity or a brighter smile. They are responding to the situation and building their own ad hoc strategy, process, and tools, and learning quickly on the job what works to close the sale.

Maybe it’s possible to hire an entire team of people who can hide all the flaws in the system, but even if you could, what you’d have isn’t a high performing team. You’d have an assemblage of high performing salespeople creating a chaotic, inconsistent experience for buyers… and annoying your delivery and customer service teams who have to live with their overpromising ways.

Stop Hiring High Performers and Build The Structure That Builds a High-Performing Team

A high-performing team isn’t a random group of salespeople who all know how to drive a hard bargain. A high-performing team is one that’s working together, toward a common goal, in a way that creates a consistent and positive experience for the customer, and that collaborates seamlessly with the rest of the organization to deliver an experience that brings customers back.

Often, the highest-performing teams are full of people who would be labeled “average” in a more chaotic environment, but are able to thrive and grow inside a system that’s built for them. Instead of hiring and firing, looking for the perfect fit, you hire people who are the perfect fit and onboard them inside a system that is set up for their success.

It starts with an effective sales strategy, matched with the right sales process and methodology, wrapped up in a Way of Selling that is unique to your organization, and reinforced by the platforms they work in every day. A platform like Membrain guides salespeople through every step to ensure they’re reaching the right stakeholders, asking the right qualifying questions, and checking every box before moving to the next stage.

It continues with good management that is enabled by useful analytics and powerful AI-assisted insights.

The best news of all is that while your “average” salespeople start to deliver stronger results, your high performers will perform better, too. They’ll benefit from the same tools and enablement the rest of the team has, and the same technology will capture the real behaviors and processes that work for them, instead of just guessing based on appearances. You get a sales team that is constantly learning from each other and becoming more effective over time.

The best sales teams aren’t the ones with a few superheroes. The best sales teams are the ones whose leadership knows how to get the best out of them.