Developing Weak Salespeople

Some of your salespeople are chronically weak – they just under perform and you don’t quite know where to begin to help them. Perhaps, you don’t even know how to help them so you just tell them to do more, try harder or keep at it. Maybe you give them your best ‘moves’ and hope they take. More often than not, you won’t be able to help but you will develop a closer relationship in the process, making it more difficult to terminate them when you give up.

Then there are some who will actually do what you say and if you begin in the right place by helping them secure quality appointments they will begin to succeed. Beware. You were not surprised when the salesperson who couldn’t get good appointments last week had lousy outcomes on those weak appointments. Now that the quality of the appointments is better, isn’t it normal to expect better results from the meetings or calls? Not really.

Your salespeople will be experiencing new ground. Their first quality meetings, qualifying quality prospects, actual competitive situations and then closing. With each new success comes a point in the selling process that your previously ineffective salesperson has yet to experience. You’ll have to provide the same help that allowed them to book quality appointments at each of these subsequent stages of the selling process. And with each passing stage, it becomes more, not less, difficult.

Is there an easier way? Yes. You could evaluate your sales force; the people, systems and strategies, and identify those who can and will improve, along with the specific help they’ll need in order to get there. Don’t know how to provide the specific help they’ll need? No problem. The sales force development experts who explain the results of the evaluation are qualified to provide the help you can’t provide. See

Objective Management Group’s web site for more information on evaluating your sales force.