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ATD Blog

(Mis) Managing Salesperson Performance Failure: When Good Intentions Produce Bad Behaviors

Tuesday, June 28, 2016
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Salespeople, especially those new to a sales career, are constantly asked to cope with performance failure. A promising lead won’t take your call. A prospect that seemed excited the day before doesn’t show up for today’s meeting. A proposal you spent hours developing fails to excite the buyer. You get the picture…failure is ubiquitous in sales.

Despite the potential for failure, we still expect salespeople to push forward. Often, a salesperson has to face another customer within minutes of experiencing a “no.” All the while, they are expected to maintain a focus on the customers’ interests and exhibit the highest levels of ethical behaviors. 

Impact of Failure

Here’s the problem: Failure, especially repetitive failure, prompts an increased sense of self-interest, frustration, and helplessness. These feelings, in turn, can have a profoundly undesirable impact on the behaviors salespeople engage in when they interact with their customers and prospects.

In research published by the Journal of Marketing and forthcoming by the Journal of Business Ethics, I (along with a number of great collaborators) have explored the ways in which sales leaders can manage, or in many cases unintentionally mismanage, salespeople during failure-prone periods. Here are some of interesting insights the research revealed.

Repetitive performance failure dramatically increases unethical selling behaviors directed toward customers. This is largely because salespeople experiencing repetitive failure come to view their failure as a permanent characteristic of their work environment. Instead of attributing their failure to inadequate effort, an incorrect approach, or pure chance, they begin to attribute it to their fixed inability or poor fit with the sales job. It is also worth mentioning that there are some “structural aspects” of sales jobs that make the relationship between repetitive failure and unethical behaviors worse. For example, contingent rewards, such as commissions or other types of variable, performance-based compensation, amplify this negative effect. 

Sales leaders can aggravate the situation by making the relationship between repetitive failure and unethical behaviors worse rather than better. For example, a manager’s transformational leadership style, which includes normally desirable behaviors like role modeling, articulating a vision, and so forth, is effective at reducing unethical behaviors during initial periods of failure. However, as periods of failure accumulate, these behaviors produce increased unethical behaviors. The same is also true when the manager provides simple reminders to the salespeople to stay ethical and focused on the customer’s needs despite their setbacks. These reminders reduce unethical behaviors at first, but they amplify unethical behaviors after repeated periods of performance failure.

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To me, there is nothing worse than deliberately doing what you believe to be the right thing (and what is often the right thing in other situations) only to find out that your well-intentioned efforts were actually making the situation worse. 

Some Simple Solutions

So what is a manager to do to avoid this fate? Well, we can’t remove the potential for failure from the sales job. Further, a quick Google search produces a long list of people arguing that failure is desirable because it can be a learning opportunity that benefits personal development. I don’t think our research goes against this “common sense” perspective, but our findings certainly draw attention to the idea that as they accumulate, periods of performance failure become a different animal than their one-time or occasional counterparts.

We’ve started calling this situation a “longitudinally emergent condition.” In other words, it’s a phenomenon with effects that manifest only over time and repetition. While isolated instances of performance failure can be instructive for a salesperson, this type of seemingly permanent failure hinders growth rather than enabling it.

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I propose two possible solutions for dealing with this issue:

  1. managers can attempt to ensure that salesperson failures are balanced with successes 
  2. managers can create “cool down” periods between sequential periods of failure.

Managers can intentionally balance failure success. Case in point: a sales manager can set aside a group of warm prospects to provide to a struggling salesperson following failure. Of course, this intervention must occur before the salesperson begins resorting to undesirable, unethical behaviors. When these warmer prospects lead to a success for the salesperson, they need to do so in a way that reinforces the right (ethical) behaviors rather than the wrong (unethical) ones! What’s more, it is critical that these successes convince the salesperson that they are not only capable of succeeding in the sales job, but also that ethical behaviors enable success.

Managers can establish “cool down” periods. This time can force failure-prone salespeople to reflect on their prior failure and reset their attitudes and intentions for their next attempts. If the undesirable effects of repetitive performance failure emerge because failure is perceived as permanent, interrupting these periods of failure could be a simple solution to warding off the effects of repetitive failure.

Many onboarding programs involve an initial period when salespeople participate in training, followed by a period when they actually sell in the field. These are two distinct stages. But what if these stages were not so separate? What if salespeople attended training for a period (a day, a week) and then went into the field to sell for a period, then returned to in-house training afterward, and so on? What if a salesperson’s learning and applying were integrated rather than segregated? This type of onboarding schedule would allow breaks from the potential trauma of the real world of selling and may be valuable in fixing the relationship between repetitive performance failure and unethical behaviors.

These are just a few suggestions presented by the research. What do you think? I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences in the Comments section!

About the Author

Willy Bolander, PhD, is a faculty member in the College of Business at Florida State University. He also is a founding partner of Cordoba Parsons, a consulting firm specializing in using an organization’s unique context to improve employee development efforts. He holds a doctorate from the University of Houston and conducts research on interpersonal influence and informal organizational systems that drive employee development and performance. His work has been published in various outlets, including the Journal of Marketing. Bolander also has been featured in a variety of business publications, including Forbes.com, YFS Magazine, and the Military Times. In addition, he is co-founder of Go Foster!, a nonprofit dedicated to recruiting and retaining great foster and adoptive parents in Florida.

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