Are You Removing Roadblocks For Your People?

I was sitting in a series of reviews.  Sales people were walking through their pipelines, key deals and other issues.  The team was struggling to make their numbers.

Of course, there were a number of execution issues, with each sales person, there were challenges they had created for themselves.  Chasing poorly qualified deals, not executing the strongest deal strategies, poor planning……

Their manager coached people on various areas, all focused on improving their abilities to execute.  As one would expect, each person needed different coaching.

But through the reviews, there two or three consistent themes that arose.  There were some roadblocks, created by their company, impacting the ability of the sales people to perform.  As we concluded the reviews, I spoke to the manager about these roadblocks.  We had seen similar things, each expressed in a different way by the sales team.  But it was clear that things the company was doing (or not doing) were impacting the ability of the sales people to perform.

This is very common.  Our people’s performance is impacted not just by how they execute, but by things the company does or doesn’t do, purposefully or not.

No amount of coaching will eliminate these problems because they aren’t problems with our people, but problems we create for them.

It’s important to understand these roadblocks to performance and to do everything possible to eliminate them.

Increasingly, we are seeing internal complexity of our organizations becoming an issue impacting sales performance.  Ironically, often in trying to be helpful to our sales people, we actually make it more difficult for them.  These are roadblocks to performance.

Or problems in other parts of the organization–quality, delivery, customer service–it can be anything.  But these problems become barriers to our people’s performance.

Or we’ve put processes, systems, approvals, or other things important to the business, but things which impact the ability of our people to perform at the highest levels possible.

Or it could be the absence of training, tools, support…..

Roadblocks can take any form.  But when we see them impacting our sales people, it’s our job to do what we can to remove or reduce them.

Are you identifying roadblocks for your people and doing everything you can to eliminate or reduce them?