How to Protect Your Sales Team From Burning Out

Sales can be a demanding profession due to the numerous ups and downs that come with the job. A fast-paced and highly competitive environment combined with stress and pressure can be a challenge for even the highest-performing sellers. We all go through it – whether we’re a world-class athlete or a top-performing sales rep, invariably we’ll hit a slump. Heck, even Michael Jordan (arguably the greatest athlete of all time) went 29-of-74 (39 percent) shooting over three games in his 1992 season. Sometimes it’s a matter of just working through it; other times, it’s time for a deep dive to tweak something that’s gone amiss in our methods. In this post, we’ll be looking at ways sales managers can catch and correct sales reps’ slumps before they devolve into a downward spiral of decreasing confidence and spawning insecurity.

Sales slumps and burnout are never easy to deal with, and facing them head-on is often uncomfortable and challenging in its own right. Here are some suggestions to help combat burn-out syndrome and sales slumps across your high performance sales team:

1. Check in Often for Early Detection

The annual performance review is becoming a relic of the past – particularly for sales reps, who benefit from shorter, more frequent feedback cycles. For an optimal balance, conduct check-ins at least every 30 days. In these meetings, be sure to not only review the previous month’s progress and productivity, but engage in bilateral, future-oriented dialogue with your reps to set individual and organizational goals for the next month. This will both allow you to spot potential problem patterns early, and address them right away in a spirit of mutual partnership and work.

2. Get Out of the Office

While you can identify many development opportunities in-house, sometimes you need to head out into the field with the sales rep to see how they’re performing in real-time with their customers. The rep may have unconsciously changed how they are managing the sales process, or need a refresher on best practices in CRM usage. Perhaps it’s even something as foundational as adjusting some of the questions they are asking. These are all things that a more distant overview could well fail to see, necessitating a more up close and personal look.

3. Coach Them Up

Once you’ve determined there’s a problem and ascertained the cause, it’s important to engage in corrective coaching to resolve the issue. How this is best played out depends on the personality of your rep. Maybe they’re the type who responds to positive, collaborative coaching structure. Or they might be the sort who functions best with a no-nonsense, authoritative approach. Success in this endeavor relies on you knowing your team members’ psychology, what specifically to fix, and precisely how to cure the malady. All three things are necessary for the proper prescription to work.

Providing access to training and similar skill-building resources can pay off in combating burn out. According to a research study by CSO Insights, sales organizations that invest in sales training for their staff typically experience higher win rates and lower turnover rates. In other words, training, education, and coaching are essential in helping sales professionals deal with and overcome customer objections and other challenges that often contribute to burn out.

4. Determine the Motivations of Team Members

It’s imperative to foster an atmosphere within the team that allows for the free flow of ideas and suggestions and in which trust can flourish. This also provides the foundation to learn more about your team members and how you can motivate them when they hit a rough patch.

5. Temporarily Set Smaller Goals and Milestones

In an ideal world, you’d be able to find the issue, come up with a solution, and order would be restored. But if the crisis of confidence is severe, the rep is insecure, or it’s been a long-term unrecognized issue of bad habits, you’ll need to readjust your expectations. Rather than expect an immediate snapback, set smaller goals and milestones that are more easily achieved. Meeting these more modest accomplishments will help bolster the rep’s confidence, particularly when supplanted by positive reinforcement. It’s a gradual process that leads to changed mindsets and habits on the part of sales reps, but it also requires you to have patience on your part.

6. Recognize and Celebrate the Wins

Perhaps the most obvious way to prevent sales professionals from burning out is to recognize their wins – during group meetings, in internal newsletters, as well as during 1-on-1’s.

Recognizing wins elevates the sales person and gives them something to look forward to. For competitive sales people, this may be just as important as the actual commission check. This type of public recognition can function as a motivator for the rest of the team — it’s a jolt of recognition that can help push everyone forward.

It goes without saying that recognizing wins isn’t limited when an opportunity is finally marked “closed won.” Equally important is to identify and recognize performance activities that lead towards wins, such as pipeline integrity, effective prospecting efforts, customer satisfaction, or the amount and quality of lead conversions.

7. Tackle the Problem – Don’t Ignore It or Sweep It Under the Rug

What happens more often than you might realize, particularly with empathetic sales managers who are dealing with tenured employees with established track records of success, is that a slump is ignored, or the wrong type of corrective measure is enacted – for example, giving more accounts to an underperforming sales rep, or dialing down their quotas. Those are tactics that treat the symptom (decreased sales numbers/productivity), but not the underlying disorder.

8. Foster an Environment of Cooperation and Teamwork

Although sales people are competitive, perhaps the best elixir for burn out is the constant support and encouragement from all members of the team. Fostering an environment of cooperation and teamwork lifts people up and encourages them to do their best. Highly competitive environments can be healthy, but they are not the only strategy that lends itself to building an effective sales organization.

A strategy of pulling everyone together towards a collective goal can be optimal. Think outside the box – perhaps a potluck to encourage team building, or by taking the team on a Friday afternoon for a team building event. Team goals help everyone to focus their efforts and help others to reach their milestones.

Nick Kane

As Managing Partner of Top 20 Sales Training and Consulting company Janek Performance Group, Nick Kane works with corporate clients to develop sales strategies and implement sales training programs that focus on cultivating a more client-focused environment that drive results in today’s marketplace. During his career, Nick has trained more than fifteen thousand sales professionals worldwide, and he is passionate about helping sales leaders and sales professionals improve their careers and, as a result, their lives. He is coauthor of the book Critical Selling and a regular contributor for Training Industry and Selling Power.

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