Last time, I talked about the importance of having a plan if you want to develop an elite sales team. The first part of that plan should list specific actions you can take in the next 90 days to improve your teams overall performance.
This might include showing your consistently poor performers to a clear crossroad: improve or you’re out. I never saw the sense in holding on to salespeople who perform poorly and have no real will to get better. And even if they do improve, they’re likely to be mediocre at best. Why would you let these people drag down the performance of the whole team. Why would you waste precious coaching time on them?
Spend the time you would have spent coaching the poor performers on the people in the middle who show promise. That’s where you’ll get your payoff. What else could you do to improve their skills? Is there training they haven’t received? Can you arrange for mentorship’s between your high performers and those that haven’t reached their potential yet?
Speaking of high performers, make sure you’re leveraging their knowledge and skills. Have them collaborate to create a Sales Playbook on best practices at each step of selling for your different customer types. (See my previous post on this subject.)
And once that’s done, look out even further and what you could do over the course of the next year to improve performance even further, how you’ll know whether your actions are having the right effect, and what you’ll do in either case.
