Managing Through Adversity

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Year-end can be the most exciting time in sales. It can also be the hardest. As an AE, you may be blowing through your number, signing deals, and having the time of your life. You could also be well behind your quota, struggling to stay motivated and worried about job security. As a leader, it’s likely that your team has a mix of both.

I’ve been through plenty of year-ends as an AE. Been on Cloud Nine many times and have also struggled, falling short of where I needed to be. This was my first year going through a year-end managing a team.

For a lot of teams, this year was tough and filled with uncertainty. Next year may be even more so.

And when reps struggle to see the path to their number they may slowly give up, blaming things outside of their control. As a leader, your job is to motivate your teams, hold them accountable, ensure they’re performing at their absolute peak, and ultimately drive revenue.

A couple of weeks ago, I connected with a great tunisia telegram data group of like-minded, high-growth sales leaders as part of David Priemer’s Sales Leadership Labs program. We meet a couple of times each month to chat through all kinds of timely topics and on that day, we tackled strategies for motivating your team at year-end (something top of mind for everyone). Something that stood out to me was that regardless of industry, tenure, or leadership title, we were all going through the same thing.

If you’re a sales leader at year-end, whether it’s your first (like me) or your 100th, your team likely fits into one of three categories:

You’re overperforming on all fronts: Trending well above quota with most of the reps on your team hitting their number.

You have a hairy path to your number: You have a shot and likely some AEs who are doing very well, some that are within striking distance, and some underperformers.

Your goal is nowhere in sight: It’s clear that you’re not going to get there and nobody on your team is either.

During our discussion, we bounced around ideas and tactics for all three scenarios. But since many leaders found themselves in one of the bottom two categories, here are four things you can do as a leader at year-end when things aren’t going your way.