To turn around low performers, Susan stopped focusing on what she needed from them and started focusing on what they needed from her.
Customer Journey Series: Susan
This article is part of a customer journey series following “Susan,” a biotech sales executive navigating rapid organizational growth, leadership pressure, acquisitions, and team scaling.
Each post explores a real coaching conversation or leadership challenge from that journey.
This is the second post in the series.
In one of our earliest conversations, we tackled the common challenge of low performers. The conversation below is a version of the conversation, nearly as I remember it. It’s a good model of how a coaching conversation turns into insight and direction for action.
Susan inherited a team with 2 low performers. Both were formerly good performers who had been lagging recently due to some changes. Over the course of this conversation, Susan learned what they needed to turn around: a lot of attention and listening, good questions to surface the problems and solve for them, coaching and support for improving outcomes.
Susan herself started as a sales rep and moved quickly into leadership. She was very driven, and even as she rose into the VP level, she crushed sales targets even when she was not fully staffed.
Her team members generally returned ten times their salary in sales.
When I met her, she was just being promoted from N. America to also head up EMEA. It was a daunting challenge, especially because at the same time, headquarters increased sales goals for all regions. She requested coaching to help support her through the transition.
The first question I asked her was: What’s your biggest problem right now?
She said, “low performers. When things are tight, everyone counts.”
We broke them down:
- Fredrick, based in Germany. Susan inherited him in March when she took over the Europe team. He was formerly a high performing sales leader but had recently been lagging. He had been demoted to sales rep, but the boss believed he was valuable, so we had to keep him.
- Mark: worked under Fredrick, now they are peers. He’s way behind. Spent two quarters selling one unit. We need to sell four units per quarter to be successful.
Mark gets in his own way. He’s insulted if I make good suggestions. He forgets to follow up, so last month, he made an offer to someone and forgot to follow up. The customer bought a competitor’s device. He had been successful before because Frederick had been handing him very good warm sales leads. Now we have a product launch and we need him to get up to speed and even upsell.
I asked: What do they need to be successful?
Susan reflected for a moment then answered: Training didn’t work. They don’t apply it and think they are above it. They need strong marketing support so they get the leads they need. Once they have the leads, I can be on top of them to close.
Once Susan was clear about what they needed, she was ready with an action plan: I can talk them through generating leads and doing proper follow ups. I’ll set up weekly 1:1s with them and we’ll work through it together.
That was the turning point for her.
She stopped focusing on what she needed from them and started focusing on what they needed from her.
She gave them what they needed and started consistent 1:1s to manage small issues early and work through them. Their performance turned around and they started hitting targets again.
Continue the Journey
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