The 90-Day Plan for a Sales Team That Keeps Missing Target

Third month in a row. The team misses target, you have the talk, everyone promises to push harder, and next month looks the same. You've tried a new incentive. You've tried sitting in on more calls yourself. Nothing sticks.

Pushing harder doesn't work when nobody has found out what's actually going wrong. Until you know that, every fix is a guess.

Month 1: Find where you lose sales

The first month is for listening, not changing. Listen to the team's real calls, wins and losses. Go through every open deal. Meet each rep on their own and ask what gets in their way. By the end of the month you can say plainly where the sales are leaking. It's usually two or three things, not twenty: weak first calls, quotes nobody follows up, or a price objection nobody knows how to answer.

Month 2: Fix how the team sells

Now you change things, starting with the biggest leak. Write down clear steps for every sale, so everyone sells the same way. Give the team better answers for the moments where deals die, the questions and push-back that keep coming up. Practise them on real examples until they come out naturally.

Month 3 and on: Run the team

The fixes only hold if someone keeps running them. That means weekly coaching for each rep, a weekly look at every open deal, and a short numbers report to the owner. This is where most teams slide back, because the owner gets busy and the rhythm stops. The manager's job is to make sure it doesn't.

Every team I've turned around followed some version of this arc. My first one took seven years. Now I install the same framework in about four months, because I've stripped it down every time I've used it.

What good looks like

By the end of the first 90 days you know exactly where you were losing sales and what changed. The team sells one way, not five. You get a weekly report you trust. Whether that turns into a target hit also depends on your product, price and market. But you'll be fixing the right things, in the right order.

Keep reading: why you can't predict next month's sales, the weekly deal review that catches deals before they slip, should you hire a full-time sales leader yet?.