Your sales reps know exactly where your team is stuck.
They tell you.
Maybe you are not listening enough. Too busy with daily tasks.
There’s one constant I’ve always witnessed: every sales team has untapped potential.
Your job, as a manager, is to leave the place better than you found it. Whether you created a team or inherited one.
Increasing the potential of your people is not optional.
Here are five things I hear in the field, again and again, that should alarm every manager.
Each one comes with a fix you can start this week.
Listen when your reps tell you this:
- My manager has no time for me.
The manager is constantly in meetings, talking to their own management.
No coaching. No help unblocking a deal.
The sales rep learns to solve problems alone, or stops trying reaching out to th emanager.
Quick fix:
Block 30 minutes, one-on-one, every week.
No cancelling.
- I spend most of my time on admin.
Every hour spent on a report is an hour not in front of a client.
What are the non-sales tasks that take most of your sales reps’ time?
Do they compensate for other departments?
Are they stuck in activities that could easily be delegated?
Never forget: you hired your sales reps to sell.
Quick fix:
List every recurring time-consuming task.
Cut, automate or delegate.
- We discuss numbers, never strategy.
They would add: we are focused on tactics rather than strategy. Almost every touchpoint is about checking numbers.
Meetings have a price. What are they used for?
They are either a cost, when they could have been skipped or replaced by an email.
Or an investment, when they deliver ROI.
Quick fix:
Before your next sales meeting, write down the one decision it needs to produce.
No decision? No meeting.
- I don’t learn from my colleagues.
No sharing of best practices.
Everyone starts from zero, alone. Every time. And it’s especially costly for new hires, who need to shorten their learning curve.
The good ideas are not shared and the team as a whole does not grow.
One person improves.
The team doesn’t.
Quick fix:
In every team meeting, ask each rep to share one thing that works.
- Negative behaviors are not corrected. Great behaviors are not rewarded.
The following message lands and gets engraved: mediocre is safe, excellent is optional.
Always keep in mind: the culture of a company is defined by the worst behavior tolerated by management.
Quick fix:
Name one behavior you will call out this week.
Good or bad.
Do it in front of the team.
I’ve experienced all of this, from both sides.
Two things I learned from experience:
- Make it a habit, then it becomes part of the culture.
- Turn it into a string of ad hoc moves that are easily forgotten, and you create even more frustration. It shows you are aware of the flaws and not prepared to bring structural improvements.
Your team has untapped potential, and it’s your job to expand it and turn it into results.
And sometimes, the first thing you need to look at is not your sales team.
It’s the environment you have created for them.
Which of these five would your reps say about you today?
👉 Pick one. Apply the quick fix this week.
And see what changed.
