Oct 27, 2026 · 29 min
Sales leaders must diagnose underperformance before prescribing help
Office Hours - Episode 7 - Dealing with Sales Under-Performers
The episode connects three costly management challenges—weak performance, demanding customers, and merged sales cultures—to clearer leadership decisions.
- 1Leaders should diagnose why performance is lagging before assigning mentors or lowering expectations for struggling salespeople.
- 2Customer value depends on profitability, support costs, strategic fit, and behavior—not revenue alone.
- 3Merged sales teams need explicitly defined shared values and behaviors rather than assumptions about cultural compatibility.
Don't miss
The clearest turn comes when the hosts reframe a stressful high-revenue customer as a profitability, support-cost, behavior, and strategic-fit decision.
The brief
Dave Hanley and Mark Cox open with a practical question: should top performers mentor struggling colleagues, or does that let leaders avoid the real performance problem?
Their answer starts with diagnosis. Before pairing people up, leaders need to clarify expectations, identify the cause of underperformance, and address difficult issues directly.
A high-revenue customer can still be a poor customer when support costs, stress, behavior, and strategic fit outweigh the account’s apparent value.
The hosts recommend customer health checks, candid conversations, and clear boundaries—while leaving room for empathy about circumstances affecting client behavior.
For merged sales teams, compatibility cannot be assumed. Leaders must define shared values and behaviors, assess the wider organization, and learn from people who have managed similar transitions.
Books & mentions
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