We all know that there are some awful salespeople out there. We have either hired them, interviewed them, or had to endure one of their painful sales pitches. I’m not speaking in terms of their ethics, but in terms of their skill level. If you’re an employer or a director of sales then you know how important it is to have quality salespeople on your team.

You can’t afford to waste time with incompetent salespeople; in fact, you can’t even afford to waste time trying to figure out who the weakest links are on your sales team are. So in an effort to save you some time and we’ve decided to outline five signs of bad salespeople.

1. Failure to Prepare

When a sales person is on their way to meet with a prospective client or customer it is so important that they “do their homework” and do more than just skim through their website or brochure. They need to know and believe in the extra value that they can offer their prospective customer and what advantages they have over the competition.

2. Poor Lead Generation

Each salesperson should be contributing to lead generation and always be networking in the hopes of acquiring new sales opportunities.

3. Untailored Presentations

A bad salesperson will use the same presentation for each prospective client. Generalizing a sales pitch greatly reduces its effectiveness. By customizing their presentations and information, based on the needs of their prospect, they will greatly increase their chances of closing that sale.

4. Poor Questions

You’ve definitely heard that old saying “there’s no such thing as a stupid question, only stupid answers” well in the world of sales stupid questions most definitely exist. Any questions asked that fail to identify the needs of a prospect are in fact, stupid questions. By asking the wrong questions, and not listening to their prospects a bad salesperson will miss key directional indicators when discussing opportunities with their prospective customers.

5. Limited Commitment to Personal Growth

One of the most fundamental differentiators between top sales performers and a bad sales person is their commitment to on-going personal development and growth. If a salesperson is not constantly striving for self-improvement and/or interested in refining their skills, then they are destined to fail or be surpassed by others.

Occasionally it’s obvious when a member of your sales team is lacking some key components to becoming a top performing, revenue generating machine.  But often that isn’t the case and too many of your scarce sales investment dollars are wasted while you figure that out.

Doing comprehensive sales assessments of your reps’ sales abilities and sales knowledge could be a valuable low cost tool that could identify gaps in your team.  This would point you in the direction of specific training areas that could help get more bang for your buck with your sales investment. Higher revenue and greater sales ROI!