Are your salespeople surprised in their reviews?

Last week I shared with inside salespeople Why self-reviews aren’t stupid and DO matter! Today I’d like inside sales managers to ask themselves: Are your salespeople surprised in their reviews?

If you’re salespeople ARE surprised by what they learn in their performance reviews, you are rolling the sales success dice.

And making the assumption we’re talking about “normal” vs. “Dungeons & Dragons” dice, here are the six sides that will hinder your teams success:

1. If you wait until a salesperson’s annual performance evaluation to bring up a behavior you’d like corrected, they probably will not even remember the incident.

2. How can the salesperson consistently improve if the only feedback window is once a year?

3. The entire year’s attaboys (or girls) along with your don’t do that list plus measurable statistics are what make up an annual review. If you haven’t had the conversations all year, what are you using for the review?

4. Micro changes are much easier to make than complete overhauls of behavior. Small corrections all year will add up faster than asking a salesperson to change how they do everything.

5. If they had a GREAT YEAR – hopefully you’ve put together what they need to keep doing together along the way. Where a BAD YEAR has already happened and hopefully you have constantly been working on what changes are needed to turn that around too.

6. When something surprises a salesperson in their review, they may end up wearing the cone of shame even if that wasn’t your intent.

Another important safety tip; an annual review is intended to be a historical look at the previous year. Keep track of the good and the bad so that you have reference points. This will also ensure you aren’t reviewing each salesperson based on your most recent interaction with them vs. their previous year’s performance.