How to Turn Around an Underperforming Sales Team

Daphne Nkosi
Dec 10
6 min read

Updated: Dec 12

When your sales team is underperforming, it does not just hit your numbers, it hits your confidence. You’ve invested in people, provided leads, maybe even paid for training. Yet results stay flat. Deals stall.

You start to wonder: Is it the team? The market? Or me?

Here’s the truth, it’s rarely just one thing. Turning sales performance around takes more than another motivational talk or tightening KPIs. It requires looking beneath the surface, understanding behaviour, and rebuilding the conditions that help your team thrive consistently.

Why Is My Sales Team Underperforming?

Sales teams often underperform not because of effort or talent, but because of misalignment, unclear expectations, inconsistent processes, and mismatched behavioural strengths. Underperformance is rarely a motivation issue, it’s rooted in friction, confusion, and poor structure.

The Three Hidden Causes Behind Low Performance

Unclear expectations: Your team does not have a shared understanding of how success should look on a day-to-day basis.
Broken or missing process: Without a process, results may become random, some deals may be close, while others may die quietly.
Mismatched behaviour: You may have strong individuals in the wrong seats. Some people are brilliant openers but poor finishers; others love structure but crumble under pressure. When behavioural strengths and job design don’t align, performance stalls and morale slips.

The Warning Signs

Underperformance rarely announces itself. It creeps in through quiet patterns:

Reps cherry-pick easy leads.
“Hot prospects” go cold without explanation.
The same objections appear repeatedly.
CRM activity is high, but conversion is low.
Deals drift past their close dates without urgency.

If this sounds familiar, you’re not facing a sales problem, you’re facing a behavioural alignment problem.

The Emotional Core of Sales Performance

Sales is emotional before it’s operational. Targets, tools, and talk tracks matter, but behaviour stems from confidence and clarity. When people feel uncertain, micromanaged, or disconnected, they default to safe habits, avoiding risk, dodging difficult calls, and losing momentum.

Observation: The Mirror Effect

Your team reflects your energy. An anxious, frustrated and inconsistent leader may echo or transfer the energy to the staff. Altering your question from “Why are you not selling?” to more of “What is getting in your way?” It moves from pressure to partnership, and that’s when performance starts to rise.

Analogy: The Beehive Effect

Like bees in a beehive, each bee has a purpose that is distinct to it. Some gather, guard, build, however they are all required to work collaboratively to ensure the end goal is met. When one part lacks, the rest compensates, it does sometimes come at a cost. You can look at the approach like working on a garden, plants won’t grow simply from yelling at them, you are required to check the soil, ensure they get the sunlight that is required, place different plants based of their compatibility and having a watering routine. The same goes for sales teams: before replacing the “plants,” fix the environment they grow in.

PRESENTATION VERSION

Behaviour-Led Framework to Rebuild Sales Performance

Turning around a struggling sales team isn’t about heroics. It’s about structure, consistency, and behavioural insight. Here’s the five-step Waggle Dance framework we use to help founder-led teams turn things around.

1. Diagnose Before You Prescribe

Guessing is not the best course of action, look into sitting down with each team member and looking into what is really happening with your team. This provides you with insight into what is really happening, you can now see if leads are genuinely poor quality. You are also able to identify if your team understands your ideal client or whether they are chasing all types of clients in efforts to make a sale.

Audit your sales data together:

Where do deals stall?
Which objections keep appearing?
How consistent is follow-up?

This isn’t about blame. It’s about pattern recognition. Once you see patterns, you can change them.

2. Define What “Good” Looks Like (Beyond Revenue)

Revenue is the outcome. Behaviour drives it. Your team needs a clear picture of what good looks and sounds like:

How should they qualify a lead?
What does an ideal discovery call feel like?
How should they handle pricing pushback?
When should they walk away from a deal?

Document your answers, even imperfectly. A simple one-page sales playbook brings alignment faster than any motivational speech ever could.

3. Match People to the Right Work

Understanding that not all sales people thrive under the same environment, forcing your different salespeople to adhere to the same process.

Use behavioural profiling (we often use PDA or similar tools) to understand how your people think and work. Then align roles with natural strengths:

Hunters: love outreach, thrive on rejection, energised by new leads.
Closers: skilled negotiators who can read emotional cues.
Account nurturers: great at upselling and relationship management.

Designing around behavioural strengths reduces stress, increases ownership, and improves performance almost immediately.

4. Install Feedback Loops That Actually Work

One annual review or end-of-month pipeline meeting won’t fix performance. You need real-time feedback, small, frequent, behavioural coaching moments.

Listen to calls and discuss specific examples.
Substitute observable behaviour for ambiguous feedback “be more confident” with “when the client raised budget concerns, you went straight to discounting next time, maybe ask what success looks like for them before adjusting prices”.
Acknowledge and celebrate your teams wins publicly.

This turns coaching into collaboration rather than correction, and it builds psychological safety, which is a hidden driver of performance.

5. Create Accountability Without Micromanagement

Accountability is not control, it’s clarity.

Establish the behaviours metrics and non-negotiable standards that are important:

Number of qualified conversations per week
Proposal-to-win conversion rates
Average follow-up time
Pipeline coverage ratio

Then give autonomy within those boundaries. If someone consistently hits outcomes their own way, don’t fix what isn’t broken.

The goal is to replace chasing updates with earned ownership. It takes time to develop a self-managing sales culture, however, it begins with trust and clarity.

What Our Clients Say

What to Do Next (Positioning Waggle Dance)

If your sales team’s performance feels unpredictable, resist the urge to hire, fire, or “motivate harder.” Start with behaviour.

At Waggle Dance, we help founder-led businesses turn sales chaos into rhythm, without burnout or bureaucracy. Our work starts with diagnosis, not assumption.

Here’s how we typically help:

Behavioural profiling: this means identifying natural strengths, blind spots and friction points.
Sales process audit: this means mapping where deals actually stall versus where you think they do.
Collaborative redesign: this means working together, rebuilding sales rhythms that align people, process, and purpose.
Hands-on implementation: we stay involved, coaching live calls and embedding new routines.

We don’t parachute in with cookie-cutter training or push long retainers. We simply fix what’s broken, fast, so you can lead confidently again.

FAQs

1. What is the turnaround time for a sales team?

After feedback loops and behavioural clarity are established, early victories frequently materialise in 4 to 8 weeks. It takes 3 to 6 months for more in depth changes, such as role redesign and new routines, to be ingrained.

2. Would it be better to replace my sales team or try to find ways to fix them and the problems?

Fix first. Most underperformance comes from unclear systems, not poor talent. Replace only after you’ve diagnosed and addressed behavioural or process gaps.

3. What happens if I don’t have a formal sales process yet?

It’s okay and common. Start by documenting what worked historically, how your best clients found you, what questions they asked, and what objections they raised. Having an unstructured or unrefined playbook is better than no structure at all.

4. How do I know if the problem is people or process?

If one or two people perform while others struggle, it’s likely behavioural or capability-based. If everyone underperforms, it’s structural. Look for consistency repeated bottlenecks mean process; scattered issues mean people.

5. Can behavioural profiling really make a difference?

Absolutely, when you act on it. Profiling shows how people naturally operate. Rethinking roles, coaching approaches and communication around their strengths is where the true magic happens.

6. What if the team resists change?

Fear or exhaustion is often concealed by resistance. Engage your group in the redesign process. Honour minor victories. Change endures when individuals take responsibility for it rather than when it is forced upon them.

Are You Ready to Stop Carrying the Sales Team on Your Back?

Book a Clarity Call Here. We’ll walk you through where your sales team is stuck, what’s really causing underperformance, and how a behaviour-led approach can unlock consistent results.