Take sales underperformance – your team, an individual or your own.

In order to fix the underperformance, you need to know what has caused or is causing it.

Validation can come from numbers and data, but that can often oversimplify the problem.

Data is only a small piece of a sales jigsaw that is increasingly becoming more nuanced, inter-connected, complex and more dynamic than ever before.

Data will comfortably tell you where you are, but it will not necessarily tell you exactly how you got there. A good manager is fluent in data analytics, but you could argue that a great manager is as close to his people as he is to the spreadsheets.

The famous ice hockey star Wayne Gretzky attributed his success not to playing the puck to where his teammates were, but rather to where they would be – pre-empting the positions of his teammates gave him a winning advantage.

As a manager, that closeness to your teammates comes from spending meaningful time with them, understanding what makes them tick and their triggers. This helps you understand where they are in terms of performance, which in turn facilitates a quick diagnosis when it comes to sorting out the ‘problem’ that needs fixing.

What you need to look out for

The Skill Gap
Is there a Skill gap – which may show up as inconsistent execution even when effort and attitude are visibly there? There’s an easy fix for this – more training, coaching, guided repetition and review.

The Will Gap
A Will gap is when they can do the job, know what’s expected, and have the confidence to do it, but have stopped wanting to. This one isn’t as readily fixable with training and coaching, and it asks a wider range of questions around the role itself, the bonus and reward system, the manager, or the environment and culture of the team.

The root cause might be a lack of visible path forward for the individual, a reward system that doesn’t match the effort required, resentment over an unaddressed inequity, or burnout. They might still perform well on the things they care about but less so on other priorities, which is less about competence and more about direction of effort.

The Clarity Gap
The Clarity gap is when they don’t know what is actually expected of them, or have been badly briefed about a change in direction. What looks like underperformance is poor communication, typified by infrequent 1-2-1s or structureless meetings.

The Confidence Gap
Finally, there is the Confidence gap – they know how, but hesitate or undersell at the key moment of execution. This often follows a knock (a lost deal, public criticism, a bad quarter), which might get misdiagnosed as a skill or will problem, eroding confidence even further.

Imagine someone loses a deal they were certain they’d close – a prospect they’d worked on for months, dies. Their close rate on everything after that drops noticeably.

A manager reading only the numbers sees a sudden decline and assumes something has shifted in their skill or effort, and starts scrutinising their pipeline more closely. That scrutiny itself makes things worse – they start bombing on calls, under-pricing to avoid risk, hesitating at the moment they’d normally push for the close.

The original knock was never addressed, so the manager ends up treating a symptom that their own response – or lack of – created.

This might all sound familiar to you.

Coaching is the methodology that gets you there. It’s how a manager spends the meaningful time with a person that data alone can’t replace, and it’s what makes it possible to tell the difference between a skill, will, clarity or confidence gap in the first place.

A sales manager who is prepared to invest time in coaching his people has the capacity to solve the underperformance problem quickly and painlessly, without any negative impact on the wider team.

‘Problem’ sales figures are always a problem, but when the problem of underperformance is framed around data alone, the options are more binary than when framed around the person and the enduring relationship of manager and salesperson.

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Photo by Anna Shvets: