WHEN SALES FAILS, LEADERSHIP

A sales team that misses target once has a performance problem. A sales team that misses target three quarters running has a leadership problem — and in my experience, the leadership is usually the last to be examined.

Here is the position I will defend, and I expect some Managing Directors to push back: in most Ghanaian and African businesses I have worked with, the sales team is not underperforming. It is performing exactly as well as the system around it allows. The comfortable assumption in the boardroom is that revenue is a field problem — attitude, follow-up, closing skill. The uncomfortable truth is that most of what looks like a sales failure was decided long before the salesperson picked up the phone.

I have watched the pattern often enough to predict it. A revenue review opens with the numbers. Within ten minutes it has moved to the people: this rep is lazy, that team lacks confidence, nobody follows up. Sometimes that is true. But when I ask the harder questions, the room goes quiet. Who is our ideal customer, in one sentence? What does a rep say when a prospect asks why we cost twenty per cent more than the competitor in Spintex? Which objection killed the most deals last quarter — and who in this room has read them? The team was handed a number and left to find the answers alone.

This is how it shows up locally. A family-owned distributor in Tema sets next year's target by adding thirty per cent to last year's figure, with no plan for where the extra thirty comes from. A bank pushes branch teams to sell a product nobody in head office can explain in plain language, then blames relationship managers when uptake is thin. An insurer loses renewals because claims took four months to pay — and the agent, who never touched the claim, is the one called into the office. In each case, leadership made a demand without building what makes the demand achievable.

The Sales Debt Ledger

Every organisation owes its sales team five things before it has earned the right to hold them accountable. I call these sales debts, because when they go unpaid, the interest is collected from the field.

1. A defined customer: who we sell to, and who we do not.
2. A defensible difference: a reason to choose us that survives the price conversation.
3. A pipeline rhythm: weekly inspection of deals, not a month-end shout.
4. Objection intelligence: a live record of why prospects delay or decline, read by leadership.
5. A kept promise: service, pricing and delivery that do not quietly undo what the salesperson secured.

Any debt you cannot show as paid is a target you had no business setting.

What to Do This Week

1. Take your last twenty lost deals and sort them: how many died from a rep's error, and how many from an unpaid debt on the ledger? Most leaders are surprised by the split.
2. Ask three salespeople to describe your ideal customer from memory. Three different answers means your positioning is a rumour, not a strategy.
3. Move the pipeline review to weekly and make it about movement — which deals advanced, which stalled, and why. This series has argued that the sale is lost in the silence; the pipeline review is where leadership finds out whether anyone is listening to it.
4. Sit in on one customer call and write down every objection you hear. That list beats most market research you will pay for.

What This Means for the Organisation

This changes what accountability means at the top. The Head of Sales owns conversion; the executive team owns the conditions for conversion. When the ledger is paid, targets become fair and pressure becomes productive. When it is not, execution beats ambition every time — and no amount of motivational Monday meetings will substitute for a customer nobody defined and a difference nobody can articulate. Leaders who accept this stop asking why the team cannot sell and start asking what the business has made unsellable.

So here is the question I would put to your next executive meeting: when your team missed target last quarter, which of the five debts was unpaid — and which director's name was next to it?