Some of your reps are behind your numbers. You can see it on the dashboard every morning.
So you do what most sales leaders do. You turn up the levels of activity, with more calls, a demand for more pipeline, maybe a team training session or two. But, reaching for the same fix you always reach for, because the dashboard tells you who is behind, rarely tells you why.
That is the problem. A rep can miss the number for many very different reasons, and each one needs a different intervention. Diagnose the wrong cause, and you can spend a whole quarter fixing the wrong thing, and with little impact.
In the last 25 years running sales teams, and consulting with businesses to improve their team’s performance, I repeatedly saw the following five key reasons your sales team could be underperforming.
1. They pitch products when buyers want value
Listen to a struggling rep on a call, or ride-along, and you tend to hear a lot about your company, your product, features, specs, what it does, how it stacks up against the competition. What you do not hear so much is an effort to understand the buyer and their world and what their problems are costing them.
They fail to understand what changes for the customer if they implement your solution to fix the issues in their business and what this means for their numbers, not yours.
Buyers do not pay for features. They pay for a result they can put a value on. The best sellers know this in their bones. The research is blunt about it: top performers have value conversations far more often than the reps who miss quota, who fill the same time explaining what the product does.
This is a skill, and skills can be taught. But first you have to know it is the gap. From a pipeline review, a rep who pitches features and a rep who builds value can look identical. Same calls, same activity, same notes in the CRM. The difference only shows in how they actually sell, which a dashboard cannot see.
2. Managers are administrating, not coaching
Here is the uncomfortable one, because it points at the management layer, not the reps.
Most sales managers believe they coach. Most reps say they do not feel coached. Both are telling the truth. The manager spends the one-to-one walking the pipeline, deal by deal, asking where each one is. That is inspection. It checks their work rather than build the person’s capabilities.
In a world where the performance of the team is the sum of individual performances, the impact of coaching cannot be overstated. Individuals coached well every week are 240% more likely to hit their quota than teams coached once a quarter or less. Many leaders know this, and yet most managers spend almost none of their week actually coaching, because their management expectations, admin and reviews swallow up the time.
If a rep is behind and nobody has shown them how to get better, more pipeline questions will not move the needle. The gap is not in the rep. It is in what happens, or does not happen, in that weekly conversation.
3. Silent self-beliefs are capping what they do
Some reps are not short on skill. They are short on belief.
It shows up in small ways.
- The big account they never quite get round to calling.
- The senior buyer they leave to someone else.
- The deal they price low because, somewhere underneath, they are not sure it is worth the full number.
Call reluctance, fear of rejection and a quiet sense that they are not a natural at selling value. These are self-limiting beliefs that are not always uncovered.
It’s important to say here that none of this is laziness, and you cannot train it away with a skills course. A seller can know exactly what to do and still not do it, because something in their head is holding them back.
This is one of the most common barriers to performance and one of the least talked about. Why? Because, nobody raises a hand in a team meeting to say they are scared to do something, or that they freeze when they need to stop procrastinating.
You will not find this in your pipeline report either. It hides behind activity that looks almost normal, but when inspected closer you realise the activity is just a little smaller, and a little safer, than it should be.
4. They want to be liked, so they find it hard to challenge
There is a kind of seller everyone enjoys having around. Warm, easy, the customer likes them. And yet, they lose the bigger deals they should win.
The reason is simple. They need to be liked by others, so they avoid anything that might spoil the mood. They will not ask the hard questions, push back on a weak assumption or tell the buyer something they would rather not hear.
The result is that the discovery stays shallow, the real problems never surface, and the deal quietly drifts all the way to no-decision or loss.
Being liked is not the same as being trusted. Buyers trust the seller who tells them the truth, even when it might be slightly awkward. But, a likeable rep who never challenges the customer feels safe to be around, but rarely changes anything.
This one is easy to miss, because sellers claim it is good relationship and rapport building but, they can struggle to move a deal forward.
5. Sellers take the easy deal instead of building a bigger one
The last one is about appetite.
Some reps are perfectly capable of winning larger, more strategic deals and yet they do not. Given the choice between a quick, small win and the slower work of building something bigger, they take the quick win every time. It closes this month. It is less hassle. And this quietly caps the growth of the whole team.
This is not a skills gap, it’s a question of mindset. Building a bigger deal means more stakeholders, more patience, and more chances to get a ‘no’ along the way. The easy deal avoids all of this risk. It also keeps your pipeline-administering sales manager off you back (showing that you are winning deals and progressing your pipeline regularly builds trust with your manager)
So the rep stays busy, regularly lands modest deals, and never stretches themselves to build deals that would materially impact your year.
You can have a team that looks active and still underperforms expectations, because everyone is taking the path of least resistance. Is cadence quietly replacing ambition?
Not all underperformance is about your people.
Some of it is structural. A CRM that eats selling time. Territories that were never balanced. A quota nobody could realistically hit. Leads from marketing that were never going to buy. These are real, and something that an improved understanding your team will not fix.
If the system is broken, start there. But once you have ruled the system issues out, you are left with your people, and the five reasons above. The trouble is that all five are invisible from a pipeline and forecast call. The numbers tell you a rep is behind, but it never tells you why. So most leaders guess, reach for their usual fix, and hope.
That is the challenge a Team Diagnostic is built to inform. It gives you a clear read on each person across four things: their skills, what drives them, how they operate under pressure, and how others actually experience them. It turns “they’re behind” into “here is exactly why they perform like they do, and here is what to do about it.” You can stop guessing and start coaching the real problems.
Your team will keep underperforming for as long as you are fixing the wrong cause. The first step is being able to see which one it is.
