5 reasons why sales teams do not work

We took some time in our agenda to establish a short list of the main reasons where small, medium and large corporations fail in structuring and managing their sales teams. After several seasons collecting information and testimonies of professionals for non-profit I have concluded with the following factors, reasons for the decrease in performance of sales teams.

 

1. Lack of motivation.

Undoubtedly it is the main issue that we are in many commercial structures, lack of motivation. Either by structural factors of the company, inability  of its directors to lead, lack of organization in the corporate design. The proceeds of this issue favors a climate of apathy, which redounds greatly on the results of production of the corporation.

 
 

2. Vertical Structures.

Although more often scarce, as we are increasingly integrating management models – we are still finding that corporations vertical structures where all decisions and proposals are based on the same origin, which causes a lack of autonomy for decision making and responsible labor exemption by the team, to proposals and business opportunities. Resulting in the loss of resilience, the result of which is a bureaucratic structure established.

 

3. Lack of internal promotion programs.

Very few are the entities that provide internal promotion programs. Such structures are more likely to make new hires, to establish professional development programs, which will serve to capture and relocate talent. In Spain, we can still find people anchored in professional positions where they started, some with more than 10 years with the same professional category, and of course without any promotion proposal to maximize professional performance. This situation leads to two possible consequences:

  1. Brain drain.
  2. Static Employee Performance

4. Absence of a strategic business plan.

Although it may seem incredible, there are still companies with no commercial corporate strategic plans and even worse, with staff serving an undefined roadmap without being focused on achieving the same goals, with categories like “multi-task” and “short-term” assigned. The result of this strategy is obvious, the inability to obtain results on budget.

 
 

5. Lack of incentive schemes, and unattainable plans.

This situation is becoming less likely, especially when we talk about the lack of incentive schemes to be added as an annual remuneration obtained as a result of the production generated variable. However, we still find outdated systems, which are based on the absence of incentives, or more commonly, variable compensation plans completely outside reality and outside market.

The sales teams are the “weapon of most importance for sale of a business structure”. They are composed of professionals who dominate the market for transactions of purchase and sale of our products and / or services, and also know the turnover of our corporations. Not considering these grounds of lack of performance falls into the largest and most absolute error in terms of lack of productivity of our businesses.