Stop Spending Time With Your Poor Performers
We were working with a social enterprise that sold interesting solar products to the rural poor throughout the world. In one Latin American country, Roberto – the country manager who was also the sales manager – had a new sales force that, despite very real challenges, was doing pretty well.
One of his senior salespeople, Geraldo, had been with him four years since the company began operations. Geraldo’s sales performance had never been very good, but he was well liked and, over the years, had shared many an after-hours beer with the manager.
The problem was that Geraldo was requiring more and more of the manager’s time. Geraldo had complaints about the other salespeople, about the customers, about how hard it was for him to keep up with the younger salespeople. Whenever Roberto would sit down and talk directly with Geraldo about his lack of sales production, Geraldo would fill up the conversation with explanations, suggestions for company improvement, and reasons why he couldn’t pass on some of his accounts to more capable salespeople.
Roberto didn’t want to disappoint Geraldo, who was not only a direct report, but by now a friend as well. The turning point came during a coaching conversation, when Roberto undertook the exercise of adding up the hours per week he was spending on Roberto, hours that he was unable to spend developing his far more willing and talented sales staff.
Your job is to get sales results through your people. When you improve their performance, you improve your team’s results and hopefully hit your targets. And the reverse is true as well. If you fail to improve the performance of your team, you won’t be taking home that bonus, and neither will they.
How do you decide where to spend your time in order to improve the results of your sales force? If you’re like most sales managers, you run into the following considerations:
You don’t want to do anything that impacts the success of their top performers. You don’t want to offend them by suggesting that you accompany them into the field. You tend to leave them alone and hope for the best.
Your middle group of performers is more problematic. You see promise in them, you want to develop it, but, when you visit customers with them, you find yourself taking over the sales conversation. You don’t know if they’re holding back out of respect or fear, but you leave the customer visit without learning more about them and their capability. You’ve done all the work.
And, you are feeling pressure from all sides to attend to the lowest group of performers on your team. When they’re not avoiding you, they are repeatedly asking the same elementary questions and getting you to do their thinking for them. And, your manager is breathing down your neck to make a decision about whether or not to retain their services.
What often happens next is a mistake. You wind up spending the majority of your time with the lowest performing of your people. Yes, it seems necessary, but no, it's not a good idea.
Here's why. Let’s say you can improve anyone’s performance by 10% with some dedicated and skilled effort on your part. Calculate the difference between a 10% improvement in your top seller’s performance and that of your bottom sellers. You get the point.
Let’s be even more honest. What’s the difference in the ‘fun’ factor between working with the best performers you’ve got and with the worst? What is the quality of conversation like? The content?
Don’t you just get sick and tired of covering the same old thing, time after time, with people who appear either too dense or too unwilling to grab hold of themselves and simply make the changes they need to make to succeed?
Now, we’re not building a case here for ignoring the bottom group – more about this in a moment. But we are making a case for stopping an endless cycle of giving them the majority of your time. It’s unproductive, it’s not enjoyable, and, to be brutally honest, it’s just a way for you to look good without actually doing good.
All of us who have succeeded as sales managers know that conversations with the top people are interesting, challenging, and creative. Conversations with the bottom performers are boring, frustrating, and – here's the kicker – the more time you spend with them, the more they depend on you. They become cautious and you become infuriated.
An even more significant problem is that time invested in poor performers reduces the time you can spend with the middle tier of performers: the people who have the promise and the passion to improve and really become stars.
And, if you fail to spend time with your very top performers, they will either stagnate or feel neglected, and they will start gravitating to other managers or other companies where their hard work is noticed, appreciated, and publicly acknowledged.
Now, let’s try something different.
Of course you need to do something for each group of people: high, middle, and low performers. But you don’t have to spend the same amount of time doing it. What you need to figure out is how to approach each group and the individuals within it so that three things happen:
Your time is spent more with the top half of performers than the bottom half.
Your sales results improve, with the better performers increasing at a more rapid rate than the poorer performers.
Each of your people take responsibility for developing themselves, instead of counting on you to do it for them.
Here’s one way to move forward:
Draw three columns on a piece of paper.
In column one, rank your salespeople from top to bottom - you decide exactly how to rank them, but consider how much they sell and how they sell it.
In column two, calculate how much time you’ve spent training or coaching each person over the past 90 days.
In column three, rank how much you enjoyed that time you spent with each person.
Schedule time with your team over the next 30 days.
Spend ¾ of this time with the top half of your performers, one-on-one, with a special emphasis on the people just below your top performers. Raise them up!
Prioritize these meetings in your schedule and never cancel them.
Get creative, try things like:
Going into the field with people. Do not take over, watch them work, and debrief afterwards.
Utilize books, videos – anything that will get them thinking and engaging in activities that will stretch them.
Use group sessions for your lower-performing people to use your time effectively and to subtly send the message, ‘Rise above your peers and get some individual attention from me.’
In 30 days, evaluate, and apply what you’ve learned.
The hardest part of doing this is creating the time. A tip: you’ll never have enough time until you take it and schedule everything else around the development of your people.
We’re guessing you’re doing a lot of other things that don’t lead to the improvement of your team. Perhaps it's time to cut back on those things and do something that can earn you some money.