How do you manage your Team when they are not performing well in sales?

Not performing well in sales is related to management and company strategy before it is related to employees.  So first one has to check:

1- Company strategy: Does it need revisiting? do we have the right plan to implement it? are we positioning ourselves right in the market? how about our marketing plan, is it effective?

2- After sales and support service: is it satisfactory to customers or is it defaming the company in the market and hence negatively affecting the sales.

If all the questions above are answered and no problems there then we start questioning the following:

1- Do we have the correct target plan system for the sales team? is it difficult but achievable? or is too easy or is too impossible to achieve? is it motivating to employees or not?

2- Do we have the correct KPIs in place to inspire and encourage the team to work?

3- Are we delivering a quality service? because if our product or service is bad then the best sales team will not be able to sell it

4- are we sure that the team is well trained on our service or product and can really present it well to the customers?

5- How about our hiring criteria and selection criteria? is it right ? are we hiring the right people in the right place?

6- Do we need training and development programs? what , where and when?

If all the above is tackled and done then the team will perform well, otherwise they are under-performers and they need to be replaced

Your sales people are the driving force of your business nurturing your existing customers and converting new prospects.

1. Provide clarity of direction. Make sure everyone knows where they are heading and are aligned.

2. Make sure they have the skills and resources to be able to achieve those goals.

3. Ensure they are disciplined around monitoring their performance regularly.

4. Know your key threats and have contingencies in place if things aren’t working.

5. Know what motivates individuals in order to get the most out of them.

Stimulation and intimidation 

On the principle of tension and loosen the rope

if good sales are not coming, there is a problem in your marketing plan, check it then move to implementation part of that plan. coach them , lead them , do not bash them because you are their manager.

The mindset of the sales team has a direct impact on the productivity and has to be set right. Look after your employees and they will look after the company, as simple as this.

Keep employees feeling their work is more than a job through regular job valorization programs as company retreat programs, workshops, continuous training, brainstorming sessions, benchmarking, free lunches, strict equal opportunity, and moral support and help them to develop positive attitude.

Celebrate creatively achievements through incentives, bonus, Salesman of the month and Salesman of the year awards in annual dinners and recognizes them publicly and ensures good media coverage of top achievers through company newsletter, Facebook page, Tweets and other social media.

Find out the reason for low performance. It could be the marketing aspects indeed, but your question implies that your marketing is all right & good enough to attract the customers who then have a sudden "change of sentiment" upon being attended to by your sales team.

Find out where the problem lies first. Is it the shortcoming of training or skills on the side of your sales people, or is the problem related to your product offering, pricing, offered customer service, availability of sales points? There is no solution for undefined problem. Conduct research & re-evaluate your sales team & sales strategy based on your findings.

Use the3 c strategy

1- confidence- try to get them confident again as the last period  of bad performance must affect them

2- challenge- try to challenge them by past success stories or other party successs

3- choaching- try to involve your self and monitor and review the performance regularly

⇒ Make commission a driving force. To get the results you want, shake up your commission structure. If you want to push a new product, offer a higher cut for that model. Make sure staff members are encouraged to land the big fish with proportionally big payoffs.

⇒ Build in peer pressure. Publicly posting sales, margins and conversion rates lights a flame under everyone.

⇒ Get the whole company behind the sale. After all, the whole organization’s survival depends on the sales department’s success. Announce contests and campaigns to the whole firm. Encourage supporting departments—such as customer service, engineering and marketing—to be supportive of the sales staff’s efforts.

⇒ Find out what motivates. Ask your sales team what they want. Experiment with different bonuses and prizes. Often, cash is king. Sometimes highly luxurious items that are reluctant self-purchases might be big winners. Other times, less tangible prizes—such as the ability to telecommute once a week—can resonate with staff.

⇒ Keep it frequent. The key to successfully motivating sales staff is to build a strategy into the daily work. Small but frequent tokens of accomplishment might include a can of soda for making a daily quota, or an early out on a Friday for a week well-done. 

when the sales team is not performing, you try to interact with them one on one to try and understand their challenges so that yiou can help them improve as individuals first.

You can also try to train them more in areas where they are lacking to enhance their skills.

Encourage them instaed of threatening them

give them small and manageable targets and only increase them as they grow and perfect their skills.

1. Quickly access past6months sales report and  highlight when started the declining.
2. After identfying the declining point, asses the other factors that may have casue for the sales decline, such as human strrengh, competencies at the given period,influences of the motivational factors (both instrinstrict and extrinstric),Internal matters, macro enviornmental factors.
3. Summarrize the assesments and prirotize the declining factors
4. After prirotizing the factors we can eliminate macro enviornmental factors which are beyond our control.
5. Then the remaining factors definitly in link with the people motivation and man management.
6. We can use various motivational techniques to moral boost of the sales team such as
   • Identifying training needs(TNA)
   • Re assess the sales targets , if the original targets are unrealistics
   • Set SMART objectives in coordination with the sales team
   • Set up rewards schemes for the continuous  perfromers.
7. Rotate the sales territories among the team.

1. Provide clarity of direction. Make sure everyone knows where they are heading and are aligned.

2. Make sure they have the skills and resources to be able to achieve those goals.

3. Ensure they are disciplined around monitoring their performance regularly