What to Do When Your Sales Team is Not Performing and the Economy is Slowing.

By Robert Estupinian

Part 1 The Evaluation

It is hard enough to deal with a sales team that is not producing as well as they should be when things are going well. It is another thing to deal with the same situation when the economy is changing for the worse.  Lately, a lot of business owners that I speak with are telling me that they feel that sales in general have slowed down and that it is possible that we are entering a recession. I know that the media is all over the board on this one. In one case there are reports by some of the major investment bankers stating that we are indeed already in a recession. Then you have other reports showing that we have not yet entered into a recession but that it is forth coming. The fact is that nobody can predict with 100% certainty what is really occurring. Nevertheless, we can all agree that something is occurring and that we have to maximize our efforts to keep up with those changes.

This is where questions about the efficiency and effectiveness of the sales force come to bare.  During these times a nasty cycle begins to develop that has always occurred during these times. First management will begin to put a lot of pressure on the sales manager and team to get performance up immediately. Rarely is there a plan of action or an assessment done to determine what could be causing the lack of sales. Usually it is felt that the lack of sales is a direct result of lazy and unproductive salespeople. Therefore, all that is necessary is to push these individuals into producing and if that does not work, get rid of them. This strategy does not work and leads many owners into a false sense of security that actually ends up wasting precious time. By the time that these tactics have run their course the business environment will have become more challenging, and often the sales staff is demoralized, and the good salespeople have moved on to greener pastures.

A more efficient method for tackling this situation would be to first evaluate the current selling environment and the efficiency of the sales staff given the current environment.  As in most business situations today there is rarely one thing that is causing the problem and it is usually a combination of issues. Also, many times  the what worked in the past is no longer applicable to the current business environment. Once that the situation has been properly evaluated it is only a matter of deciding what handful of strategies are best suited for effecting the desired change.  One thing that I have noticed is that often business owners and mangers want to quickly solve the problem, and take a “shot from the hip” approach to tackling an issue that would be better served by properly analyzing it first. This sense of urgency and frustration are often further exasperated by the economic changes or threat of economic changes facing the organization.

Now, I am not advocating taking a long time to do these initial analyses. The last thing that I would recommend is the forming of tasks forces and having ongoing meetings. This extreme approach can lead to the proverbial, “paralysis by analysis” situation that can end up costing more and hurting the bottom line in the process. Doing an efficient evaluation does not have to take a lot of time and can instead save a lot of money if done properly.

In part 2 we will review some of the techniques that we can use in evaluating the sales