There is no easy answer to the question “what are you going to do to turn things around?”
Most of us have experienced sales dry spells at some point in our careers. There is nothing worse when you are struggling than having to sit down with your boss (or your boss’s boss) and answer this question. Often it is worse than this, with the question normally ending in the words “quickly?” or more ridiculous still “this month?”
Questions like this from sales leaders miss the point. Business doesn’t fit neatly into monthly cycles or a set calendar of regular revenue generation. It is a fluid thing, with many variables, most of them human, and it takes real effort, sometimes patience and months if not years of diligent application to be good at it.
A good sales leader knows this. They know that business written in a moment is the accumulation of relationship building, continuous prospecting effort, developed skills, a healthy dose of growth mindset, a peppering of sector specific knowledge and earned trust with a customer. None of these ingredients arrive instantly.
Normally if a salesperson is struggling there are underlying reasons, which in turn may have resulted in a dip in either skill set or mindset.
A less difficult answer
A good leader would know there is no easy answer and instead re-frame the question. They might say “I can see that things are difficult at the moment, how can I help?” They would avoid pressure, they would try and keep the conversation open and show their team member that it is a shared problem with some joint responsibility to fix.
It can be really easy to resort to sales gimmickry when things are tough – short term discounts, unnatural month end conversations with customers, changes of strategy away from what you really believe. Some of these deliver some short term gain but they tend to prove to be a distraction from longer term success and can erode customer trust.
So the good leader will avoid all of these blind alleys and try and get to the root cause of the problem. They would know that the sales dry spell was probably the result of a change months ago. Therefore, they would also know it may take a few months to re-build. That is fine.
By having an open conversation with no immediate or unhealthy pressure, the salesperson is more likely to relax and open up about what is holding them back. Often they are aware of the causes, even if they need a little teasing out. I’ve found that people are quite honest and good at self-evaluating if they know there will be no ramifications through being so open.
Reasons can vary
Reasons have included drops in activity weeks back causing pipeline gaps in the present, a lack of mental stimulation or boredom, not feeling challenged, skills gaps where they have been nervous about asking for help, lack of applied strategy to sales activity, feeling out of their depth in certain situations, something has happened in their personal life impacting their business performance and so on. The list really can be endless. Sometimes it has also been that I haven’t given them the correct tools or training to be successful (takes a real leader to admit if they are the cause).
All of this is acceptable. The point is that once the reasons are exposed a sensible plan can be constructed to recover. The plan may involve more coaching, more accompaniment during sales activity, access to more learning, freedom to handle some personal issues, changes on the part of the leader, building actions for the months ahead to re-ignite learned behaviours; whatever it takes to address the unique situation of the individual.
Remember that people are unique
That is the point really. People are unique, so a broad-brush “you must do better” leadership style will not be effective in the long term and will not encourage good performance. Instead the leader will lose respect and the salesperson will leave.
So you see, there really is no easy answer, but there is always a way forwards. It takes a good leader, open-ness on both parts and some good old-fashioned and very human support.
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