Tired of hearing excuses? One of the biggest complaints I hear from sales managers and directors is excuses coming from their sales people for deals that they haven't closed or sales they haven't won. If you have sales people who are making excuses for poor performance, you should consider a couple of different approaches.
One approach is confront them with their excuses and tell them that you're tired of hearing excuses and ask them why they use excuses to cover up poor results. Another approach is to consider taking corrective action up to and including termination of those sales people. Sales people who make excuses and tend to externalize the reasons for poor performance are sales people who are not committed to continuous improvement.
Only by taking ownership for and responsibility for what's happening in their territory will sales people continue to improve and actually accelerate their sales over time. So if you have sales people who are making excuses and they do it chronically, consider whether or not if these are the kinds of people you can afford to have in your company. I've moved many of those kinds of people out of my business and replaced them with people who've had more of an owner's mindset, and I've found much better results coming as a consequence of just that one behavior. Stop making excuses is one of the best ways to get your sales people back on the track to sales success.
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