The Sales Performance Factors You Cannot Afford to Ignore

Sales leaders naturally look for the factors that separate their best performers from everyone else.

What do top salespeople do differently? What characteristics do they possess? What should we hire, coach or reward?

But our recent study points to another important category of performance drivers: factors that do not consistently distinguish high performers from lower performers—but whose absence can undermine performance.

Think of them as table stakes.

They may not make a salesperson exceptional. But if they are missing, performance can suffer.

Three areas sales leaders need to get right

The first is goal orientation.

Salespeople need an appropriate level of achievement focus, performance orientation and willingness to learn and improve. Having more and more of these characteristics does not necessarily keep producing better performance. But a salesperson with little motivation to achieve, develop or respond to performance expectations is unlikely to thrive.

The second is work engagement.

This includes factors such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, job involvement, motivation and positive emotional connection to the work.

Again, exceptionally high engagement does not automatically create an exceptional salesperson. But disengagement, low commitment or chronic dissatisfaction can become significant barriers to performance.

The third involves the psychological demands of the job.

Salespeople need sufficient role clarity and manageable levels of role conflict, ambiguity and burnout. A perfectly designed role does not guarantee superior performance—but confusion, competing expectations and sustained psychological strain can prevent capable salespeople from performing at their best.

The management implication

These factors should not necessarily be treated as differentiators when hiring or developing salespeople.

Instead, sales leaders should ask:

“Have we created the minimum conditions necessary for good performance?”

That means:

• setting clear expectations and goals;
• creating opportunities to learn and improve;
• maintaining reasonable levels of engagement and commitment;
• clarifying roles and responsibilities; and
• identifying excessive conflict, ambiguity and burnout before they become performance problems.

The takeaway

Not every factor that matters to sales performance creates high performance.

Some simply remove the barriers that prevent it.

Sales leaders therefore need to distinguish between:

performance differentiators — factors that help create superior performance,

and

performance table stakes — factors that must be present at an acceptable level to avoid dragging performance down.

The practical question is not always:

“How do we create more of this?”

Sometimes it is:

“Are we allowing a preventable deficiency here to undermine otherwise capable salespeople?”