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When sales departments of most commercial enterprises sit together to review their performance, it presents a great opportunity for the organization’s leaders, sales leaders, managers and sales professionals to improve their performance in the next performance period or cycle. It is an excellent practice in leadership, strategy and performance management, and if you have a sales team but do not carry out these periodic reviews, then you absolutely must! However, for many commercial organizations especially those in the high-stakes financial services industry (banking, insurance, pensions and capital markets), QPRs or “Quarterly Performance Reviews” are an age-old tradition. Incidentally, a lot of these institutions actually have these meetings on a monthly basis, but now call them Monthly QPRs – which is inappropriate but confirms how “cultural” the expression has become in most institutions.
Unfortunately, in almost two decades as a finance industry professional and consultant, I have come to the awful conclusion that most of these QPRs are highly dysfunctional, and do not actually help the organizations to improve their performance in a sustainable way. Most sales professionals and professionals come into the meetings with great fear and trepidation and leave after a day or two intimidated, scared and sometimes reticent, and waiting for the impending loss of job that may be their lot as a result of their under-performance, rather than being “gingered” and equipped to improve their performance – which should be actual goal of these sessions.
Before I venture to describe what I have come to identify as the 3 dysfunctions of your QPR, I will like to share one curious general thought on QPRs – why isn’t only for sales People? Shouldn’t professionals in back and middle office roles like customer service, operations, IT etc. also have the rigour and enjoy the benefits of QPRs? Some organizations do this, but many do not – I think that performance reviews for a team are always a good thing for sales and non-sales teams. I even suspect that a number of non-sales teams try to avoid institutionalizing QPRs just to avoid the “toxic” effect that they have as evidenced by what happens in the sales teams. It’s like saying that you will not give feedback to your team members just because each time you do people get upset and defensive. Clearly, it is because there is something wrong with your approach. Here are the three dysfunctions of your QPRs and my best advice on how to use the QPRs more effectively:
- “Shredding” Instead of coaching: If QPRs are meant to motivate (ginger) and equip professionals to sustain and improve their performance, then the language and tone of these sessions must be “coaching” rather than the insults, name-calling and threats (collectively known as “shredding”) that many of these sessions have become. When you “shred” under-performers at these sessions you will get some measure of performance improvement, but mostly what you will get and do get is palpable fear, the sustenance of an unprofessional culture, and what seems like the semblance of improvement – which in reality is just a half-hearted attempt to avoid being shredded and disgraced at the next session. QPRs should be coaching conversations with professional non-prescriptive feedback that engages, inspires and motivates but most of all challenges the team to “think for a change” through powerful questioning, stories and anecdotes that are synonymous with coaching the result – better and more sustained performance, and a better, less toxic culture and organization.
- Falling for the fallacy of sales numbers: Sales numbers are historical information. They report past performance that cannot be change. Future sales can be changed, and that should be the focus. So, when QPR sessions celebrate the top performers and denigrate the bottom performers without paying attention to the two components that drive sustainable sales results, then you are guilty of the fallacy of sales numbers. Sometimes a lot of sales success may be just a one-hit wonder – my uncle was just appointed the CEO of a government agency…So, you celebrate that top striker who got lucky in this quarter and by the next quarter, the person slides back to under-performance. Praying for a family member to be in a position of influence is not sustainable. What is sustainable as far as sales is concerned are two things – a) setting goals and managing performance along a well-defined sales cycle and b) continuously evaluating and building the sales competencies required to deliver results along the sales cycle. When QPRs focus on these, you create better professionals, build a culture of professional (not junkyard) selling, and create a sustainable pipeline of sales results.
- Failing to spark innovation to transform under-performance: This is particularly of interest to the human resources business partners that sit on these sessions, whose most important yet highly under-played role in organizations is that of a performance consultant. Instead of just noting the names of those to be placed on performance improvement plans during the sessions, you should facilitate performance consulting sessions that try to identify the root-causes of the under-performance using the sales cycle as a reference, and then deploying collaborative creative thinking tools (divergence and convergence) to develop and implement concrete solutions that can take the under-performers from so-so to excellent.
We have all collectively fostered very negative cultures around performance management in our sales teams especially with these QPRs, and need to be intentional about doing things properly, so that we can create professional, competent and result-driven sales teams. If we don’t we may still achieve moderate levels of sales performance from one period to another but create toxic cultures and weak leaders. If we do, we will grow our sales results exponentially, create a culture of innovation and better sales leaders for the future.
Omagbitse Barrow FCA
Omagbitse Barrow is an Abuja-based Strategy & Innovation Consultant
@gbitsebarrow
