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How to Improve Sales Performance: 4 Strategies That Work
Most sales leaders assume a slow quarter means the team needs more calls, better leads, or more motivation. Research tells a different story. In a study of over 300 sales calls across 25 organizations conducted by The Sales Board, 63% of salespeople never asked for commitment at all. The problem wasn't effort. It was process. Improving sales performance rarely comes from pushing harder. It comes from giving every rep the same repeatable process: a clear commitment decided before each interaction, questions that uncover real differentiation, value tied to what the prospect already needs, and a defined way to ask for commitment. That shift, from hustle to structure, is the whole answer. The rest of this post is the “why” and the “how.” Why Sales Performance Problems Are Usually Process Problems When a deal stalls or a rep misses quota, the instinct is to add pressure: more calls, more pipeline, more hours. Most reps aren't failing because they aren't trying. They're failing because they don't have a repeatable way to run a sales conversation. Without a process, every call depends on the rep's memory, instinct, and mood that day. Some days that works. Most days it doesn't. A process gives every rep, from your newest hire to your top performer, the same reliable path to a commitment. The 4 strategies below build that path. Install them one at a time and coach them consistently, and you'll see steadier performance across your whole team, not just from your best rep. Strategy One: Decide on Your Commitment Before You Get Started Before every sales interaction, decide what you want the prospect to agree to by the end of it. This is different from deciding what you want to learn or accomplish for yourself. What You Want to Learn or Accomplish What You Want the Prospect to Commit To Learn about the prospect's current process Schedule a discovery meeting Introduce your company Get agreement to review a proposal together Understand who makes the final decision Get a signed agreement Learning goals are useful. They just don't move a deal forward on their own. A meeting can go well, feel productive, and still end with nothing decided. That's a learning goal without a commitment behind it. The commitment you decide on should match the next milestone in your sales cycle. If the next milestone is a discovery meeting, aim for that, not a signed agreement. Map out the milestones in your sales cycle, and the right commitment to ask for at each one becomes obvious. Example: picture two reps on your team, both finishing a first meeting with a new prospect. Rep A: Great talking with you. I'll follow up soon. Prospect: Sounds good. Rep B: Based on what you shared today, I'd like to put together a short proposal and walk through it with you next Thursday at 2pm. Does that work? Prospect: Yes, let's do that. Neither rep did anything wrong in the conversation itself. But only Rep B walked in with a decided commitment to ask for, and only Rep B walked out with the deal moved forward. Coaching tip: before every call, ask each rep one question: “What do you want the prospect to agree to by the end of this call?” If the answer is vague, the call has no target to hit. Strategy Two: Ask Questions That Uncover Your Differentiators Most reps ask the same needs questions every competitor asks: “What are your biggest challenges?” or “What's not working with your current vendor?” These questions are fine, but they potentially surface needs anyone can solve. That's how a sale turns into a price competition. Most salespeople think differentiation happens in the pitch. It doesn't start there. Differentiation gets built during discovery and lands when you present your solution. Skip the groundwork in discovery, and no presentation later can make up for it. Differentiation-focused questioning means asking about the prospect's situation with your specific strengths in mind. Before the call, list out what makes you, your company, and your solution different from the competition. The more of these differentiators you can build questions around, the more differentiated your position becomes. Then build questions that only make sense to ask if that difference matters to this buyer. A useful pattern: start with a general question about the problem, follow up with something more detailed, then ask a question that brings real emotion or urgency into the conversation, not just logic. General: “What would you want to see improved about your current process?” Follow-up: “What kind of errors come up when information is incomplete?” Emotion or urgency: “What would continued errors like this do to your reputation in the market?” Teams that ask mostly open-ended questions close more often. In the Sales Board research, successful calls had 25% more open-ended questions than closed-ended ones. Failed calls had 86% more closed-ended questions than open-ended ones. Example: Rep (closed, generic): Are you happy with your current vendor's response time? Prospect: It's fine, I guess. Rep (open, differentiated): Walk me through what happens on your end when your vendor is slow to respond. Prospect: Honestly, we scramble. Last month a delay cost us a client meeting. The second question doesn't just get a longer answer. It surfaces a need that a fast, reliable response time, if that's your differentiator, directly solves. Coaching tip: have each rep list out their differentiators, then draft a general and a follow-up question for each one before their next call. Strategy Three: Build Value Propositions Around a Differentiator, Not a Feature List A common mistake is presenting a wall of features and hoping the prospect connects the dots. Most won't. Research from The Sales Board found that 82% of salespeople fail to differentiate themselves from competitors, and a feature-heavy pitch is one of the biggest reasons why. A value proposition works because it does the connecting for them: it ties a specific strength directly to a need the prospect already agreed they have. A simple structure: Remind the prospect of the need they already agreed to. State the specific feature or capability that addresses it. Explain what that means for the prospect in time, money, or risk. Ask a question that confirms it landed. Look closely at that structure. Only one of the four steps is about you, your company, or your solution. The other three are about the prospect: their need, their outcome, their reaction. A value proposition built this way stays centered on the customer instead of your solution. Example: Feature dump version: We offer 24/7 support, cloud backup, mobile access, real-time reporting, single sign-on, a dedicated account manager, and API integrations with most major platforms. Value-tied version: You mentioned that a system outage last quarter cost you a full day of lost orders. Our platform runs automated cloud backups every hour, so if something goes down, you're back online in minutes instead of losing a day. What would avoiding that kind of downtime save you in overtime and recovery costs each quarter? The second version connects to a need the prospect stated out loud. The prospect doesn't have to guess why the feature matters. The rep already told them. Coaching tip: for every differentiator on your team's list, have reps write the answer to “so what does this mean for the customer, in dollars, time, or risk?” If they can't answer that in one sentence, it's a feature, not a value proposition yet. Strategy Four: Follow a Process for Asking for Commitment The Sales Board research found that reps attempt to gain commitment in only 37% of sales calls. That means in 63% of conversations, no one ever asks the prospect to move forward. The deal quietly stalls, and a stalled deal is more likely to end up lost to a competitor who does ask. Three reasons show up again and again: No commitment was decided on going in, so there's nothing specific to ask for. Buying signals get missed because the rep is focused on what to say next instead of listening. There's no repeatable process, so asking feels risky or awkward. Summarize the value tied to the need the prospect already agreed to. State the price or time investment clearly. Ask directly for the next step. A simple, repeatable process removes the guesswork: Example, asking for the sale: Rep: Based on what we've covered, this solution addresses the delivery delays you mentioned and should reduce them by roughly a third. The investment is $2,000 a month. Would you like to move forward with a 90-day pilot starting next week? Prospect: Sounds good, let's get started. Example, asking for the next conversation: Rep: Based on what you've shared about your onboarding process, I'd like to set up a 30-minute call next week to walk through it together and pinpoint exactly where the delays are coming from. Does Tuesday at 10am work? Prospect: Sure thing, that works for me. The commitment doesn't have to be the sale itself. Early in the sales cycle, it might just be the next conversation. Either way, the process is the same: summarize the value, state what it will take, and ask directly. Coaching tip: role-play the ask in team meetings until it feels automatic. When you review recorded calls, check for one thing first: did the rep ask for commitment, and when? There's More to Sales Performance Than These 4 Strategies These 4 strategies won't cover everything that affects sales performance. Listening skills, rapport building, objection handling, and reviewing your own calls after the fact all matter too. We'll cover those in a future post. For now, installing these 4 strategies across your team is a strong place to start. So, How Do You Actually Improve Sales Performance? It rarely comes down to hiring better talent or pushing harder. It comes down to giving your team a repeatable process: a clear commitment decided on before every interaction, questions that uncover real differentiation, value propositions tied to what the prospect already agreed matters, and a simple process for asking for commitment. A study by the Aberdeen Group compared the results of companies using Action Selling against the results of companies using other leading sales training providers. Action Selling clients saw: 37% of reps hit quota, compared to 24% with other sales training providers Average deal sizes 34% higher, compared to 19% with other sales training providers Customer retention at 27%, compared to 14% with other sales training providers Sales cycles reduced by 26%, compared to 11% with other sales training providers Start with one strategy. Coach it until your team does it without thinking. Then move to the next. Structure beats hustle. What's the difference between a goal to learn something and a goal to gain a commitment? A goal to learn something is about what you want to accomplish for yourself, like understanding the prospect's current process or learning who makes the final decision. A goal to gain a commitment is about what you want the prospect to agree to, like scheduling a follow-up meeting or signing an agreement. You can walk away from a call having fully met the first kind of goal and still have nothing decided, because the second kind is what actually moves a deal forward. How can my team differentiate when we sell a commodity product? Differentiation doesn't have to come from the product. It can come from your company: how you do business, your responsiveness, your track record with similar customers. It can come from you, the salesperson: your expertise, how well you understand their business, and the fact that you're easier to work with than the average account manager they've dealt with before. A commodity product still gets bought from someone. Give the prospect a reason for that someone to be your rep. Why do sales reps avoid asking for commitment? Research shows most reps never formally ask. Common reasons include not deciding on a commitment before the call, missing buying signals during the conversation, and not having a simple, repeatable process to fall back on. How do I know if these strategies are actually improving performance? Track the metrics the Aberdeen Group study used: quota attainment rate, average deal size, customer retention, and sales cycle length. Improvement in these numbers over a quarter or two is a reliable sign the process is working. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur? Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
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The Skill 90% of Salespeople Get Wrong & How AI Sales Tools Can Help
What Is the Salesperson’s Weakest Skill? The weakest skill for most salespeople is handling objections. Brickwork’s research, drawing on assessments of more than 350,000 salespeople, finds that over 90% of reps are ineffective at uncovering and then resolving objections. Since objections arise in most selling situations, this is a big reason why so many salespeople consistently miss quota. I’d argue it’s the most consequential and neglected skill in B2B sales. The Numbers Are Hard to Ignore 64% of salespeople fail to ask for commitment. That alone is alarming. But consider the downstream effect – you’ll never hear a customer’s objection unless you ask for the business first. Which means the 90%+ failure rate on objection handling likely understates the full scope of the problem, because it only counts reps who got far enough to encounter one. Salespeople know it’s a problem, yet they still can’t execute. Why? Because they’ve been taught the wrong things. Why Traditional Sales Training Fails on Objections The Methods Haven’t Changed in Decades The techniques most sales training companies teach for handling objections haven’t meaningfully evolved. The Feel, Felt, Found method dates back generations: “I know how you feel. Other people felt that way until they found…”. Equally persistent is the myth that objections are buying signals. Major sales training companies continue to teach this. They’re not. An objection is a customer’s response to an unasked question. It’s a signal that something critical was missed earlier in the discovery process, not an invitation to celebrate. Training Offers Tips Instead of a Process Most objection-handling frameworks from well-known training vendors collapse into the same four vague steps: Listen: As if active listening isn’t something good reps are already doing throughout the entire conversation. Question: Sound advice, but with no direction on which questions to ask or how they connect to the buyer’s specific concerns. Respond: Frequently accompanied by psychological frameworks (cognitive dissonance, behavioral research) that offer no practical, repeatable guidance. Confirm: Verifying that the objection was addressed but failing to follow through with the actual next step of asking for a commitment. These steps function as a detour. Salespeople leave the sales process, wander around, and hope to find their way back. To handle objections well, they need to stay on the path toward gaining a sale without ever abandoning their methodology. Stalls and Objections Are Not the Same Thing One of the most damaging mistakes in conventional sales training is treating stalls and objections as interchangeable. They are not, and handling them the same way almost always fails. Examples of a stall include “Let me think it over,” “Send me a proposal,” and “Call me next week.” They don’t reflect a specific concern and instead mean: I’m not quite sold yet. Sell me some more. An objection, by contrast, always ties to one of the five buying decisions every customer makes: Salesperson, Company, Product/Service, Price, or Time-to-Buy. “Your price is too high” and “I prefer the competition’s solution” are examples of an objection. These require fundamentally different responses than a stall, yet nearly every training program lumps them together. What Actually Works: Objections as Unasked Questions The most effective reframe in objection handling is this: an objection is a customer’s response to an unasked question. When a customer pushes back after you ask for commitment, it’s almost always because a critical question went unasked during the discovery phase. The objection reveals a buying decision that wasn’t adequately addressed. The correct response is to return to that discovery phase, ask the best questions to surface what’s really driving the resistance, and then work back through to a commitment. This approach keeps salespeople inside their selling process. No detours. No psychological jargon. Just a disciplined, repeatable path. Distinguishing Stalls From Objections in Practice When you ask for commitment and receive a stall, don’t challenge it. Instead, use what Brickwork calls a universal stall breaker. This is an empathetic acknowledgment followed by a Trial Feature Benefit Reaction (TFBR) sequence that re-engages the customer without confrontation. If, after that, the customer surfaces a specific concern tied to one of the five buying decisions, now you have an objection and know how to address it. The sequence matters. Skipping it is how most objection-handling frameworks fall apart. The Knowledge Gap vs. the Application Gap There’s an important distinction buried in our assessment data: most salespeople actually know quite a bit about the five critical selling skills. The overall average knowledge score is 62 out of 100. But they only apply about 44% of that knowledge in real selling situations. This is an application problem that training content alone won’t fix. What fixes it is practice: deliberate, repetitive, corrective practice in realistic selling scenarios. The skills where the gap between knowledge and application is widest? Gaining commitment, sales call planning, and questioning – the exact skills at the heart of objection handling. How AI Is Closing the Objection-Handling Gap This is where the conversation shifts from diagnosis to solution and where AI is starting to make a difference. Traditional sales training happens roughly four times a year. A rep attends a session, receives a knowledge boost, and then returns to their territory. Within weeks, old habits return. The skills never become second nature because there simply wasn’t enough practice. Tandem by Action Selling addresses this directly with AI-driven coaching built on the proven 9 Acts sales methodology. Instead of waiting for the next quarterly training cycle, reps can practice objection handling as often as needed. And they do it in a private, judgment-free environment against AI buyer personas built from your actual ideal customer profile. The impact is measurable: Consistent practice between live training sessions ensures skills compound rather than fade. AI personas that mirror real prospects give reps exposure to the exact objections they’ll face in the field, not generic role-play scenarios. Immediate feedback on delivery, pacing, question quality, and objection resolution without waiting for a manager coaching session. Reporting that tracks progress against goals, giving sales leaders visibility into who is improving and where coaching is still needed. What gets measured gets learned. AI tools like Tandem make it practical to measure objection-handling skills continuously, not just at training checkpoints. The Path to Mastery Selling is a skill that can be taught, measured, and improved. But improvement requires the right foundation: a well-documented methodology, training grounded in valid learning principles, and manager reinforcement. Now, AI-powered practice closes the gap between what reps know and what they can execute under pressure. If your team is struggling to hit its quota and you’re not sure why, the data points to a place worth examining. 90% of salespeople can’t handle objections effectively. That’s a training problem — and in 2026, it’s a solvable one.
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AI in Sales: How to Separate the Helpful From the Hype
The AI Pressure Is Real. So Is the Risk of Getting It Wrong. Every sales leader I talk to these days is hearing the same thing: “What’s your AI strategy?” The pressure is real. If you haven’t figured out exactly how AI fits into your sales motion, it’s easy to feel like you’re already behind. But the noise around AI in sales is louder than the signal right now. New tools keep flooding the market, and most of them are making big promises. Before you make a decision – or worse, make the wrong decision – you need a clear framework for evaluating what’s actually worth your team’s time. What Should AI Sales Tools Actually Do for Your Team? AI sales tools fall into two broad categories: Productivity tools that save time and efficiency Skill-building tools that make your salespeople better at selling Both have genuine value, but they solve very different problems, and the right choice depends on what your team actually needs most. Most of the tools you'll encounter fall into the first bucket. They automate admin work, summarize calls, draft emails, and give reps back hours in their week that can be redirected toward selling. They also help with prospect research, surfacing what reps should know about a buyer before they ever get on a call, so they walk in prepared instead of winging it. These are valuable. But there’s a another category of tools designed to develop selling skills with the kind of deliberate practice that changes performance. That’s where the bigger long-term upside lives. 4 Baseline Questions to Ask About Any AI Sales Tools Before you get into the specifics of what a tool does, start with these questions: 1. Will my data stay secure? When your salespeople use an AI tool, your proprietary information (client data, playbooks, IP, etc.) shouldn’t be used to train someone else’s large language model. Make sure you understand how the tool handles data. 2. How difficult is implementation? People often underestimate the time and cost to get an AI sales tool up and running. Ask specifically: How long before the tool is usable? And will you need to pay a third party to configure it, or can your team stand it up independently? Slow, expensive implementations drain your return on investment (ROI) before you’ve seen a single benefit. 3. Will my reps actually use it? Adoption is everything. If your salespeople are already overwhelmed, adding a tool that requires extensive training before is a recipe for shelfware. The steeper the learning curve, the lower the adoption. Ask yourself honestly: if a rep opened this tool cold, would it be obvious what to do? 4. Can I see whether it’s working? As a sales leader, you need visibility. Can you tell whether your team is using the tool? Can you see what results they’re getting? If the tool is a black box from a management standpoint, you’ll have no way to evaluate your ROI or make changes when adoption stalls. Going Deeper: Evaluating AI Sales Tools for Skill Development If you’re specifically looking at AI sales tools designed to help your team get better at selling, not just work faster, three additional questions matter. These tools are built around practice: giving reps a low-stakes environment to rehearse their conversations, work out their talk tracks, and sharpen their skills without doing it in front of a live prospect. Think of it like a batting cage. Your reps take swing after swing without a prospect on the line. The problem every sales leader knows is that most salespeople don’t practice nearly enough. And when they do, it’s usually during an actual sales conversation. AI changes that equation, but only if you pick the right tool. 5. Does it reinforce your sales methodology? The AI tool should align with the specific sales process and methodology you’ve already invested in. If your team has been trained on a particular framework and the AI roleplay tool is giving feedback that pulls them in a different direction, you’re undermining the training investment you’ve already made. When evaluating these tools, ask: Can the feedback be configured or calibrated to match our sales methodology? The answer to that question will tell you whether the tool multiplies your existing investment or dilutes it. 6. Does the practice feel real? The value of AI roleplay is directly tied to how realistic the interaction feels. Does the AI sound like your ideal customer profile? Does it surface the kinds of objections your prospects actually raise? Does it use the industry language your buyers use? A practice interaction that sounds nothing like a real prospect conversation isn’t building the right muscle memory. Before you commit to a tool, ask for a demo that mirrors your specific buyer, and evaluate whether it would truly prepare your team for a real conversation. 7. Can it analyze real sales conversations too? The most powerful AI skill-building tools close the loop. This means a rep uses the AI to rehearse before a meeting, then uploads a recording of the actual Zoom or Teams call afterward to get feedback on how they really performed. This creates a continuous improvement cycle: practice before, analyze after, get better for next time. If an AI tool can only do one half of that loop, you're leaving a significant part of its potential value on the table. Cutting Through the AI Noise You don’t have to feel overwhelmed by the volume of AI tools hitting the market. The landscape is crowded, but the framework is simple: Start with your goal. Are you trying to make your team more efficient, or are you trying to make them better sellers? The answer shapes everything else. Ask the baseline four questions for any tool you evaluate: data security, implementation cost, ease of use, and leadership visibility. If you’re evaluating a skill-building tool, add the three additional criteria: methodology alignment, realism, and the ability to analyze real calls. The sales leaders who will get the most from AI aren’t the ones who move fastest. They’re the ones who move clearly by knowing what problem they’re solving and holding every tool to a consistent standard.
Harness Sales Expertise and AI Innovation in Tandem
Key Takeaways: Sales skills fade fast. Without ongoing reinforcement, reps drift back to old habits within weeks of any training event. Tandem by Action Selling turns one-off training into continuous coaching, pairing the 9 Acts methodology with AI so reps can practice on demand. Reps get private, judgment-free roleplay and real-time feedback, so they build confidence before real buyer conversations, not during them. Sales leaders get reporting on engagement, progress, and skill gaps, so coaching time goes where it actually moves the needle. AI does not replace the methodology or the manager. It scales the practice and reinforcement that used to be impossible to deliver rep by rep. None of us, no matter our success, is a finished product. Professional growth isn’t achieved; it’s developed. It is cumulative – bit by bit, little by little over time. It is an active, always-on process.
SEG’s Action Selling Named a Top 20 Sales Training Company
Action Selling, SEG’s sales training division, has been named a Top 20 Sales Training and Enablement Company for 2025 by Training Industry. It’s another big win for our team and, more importantly, for the sales professionals who use Action Selling to crush their goals.