Toxic sales cultures are wreaking havoc on startups. Most leadership fails to react quickly and take the issue seriously.
The seemingly most prevalent type of toxic sales culture is the one that has low performers attacking high performers. Just like Coach Nick Saban stated, “Mediocre people don’t like high achievers.”
If you are in leadership at a startup, and you want to avoid this common toxic sales culture, here’s an ebook to tell you what phase you’re in and how to circumvent each phase.
I hope this helps leadership teams out there at startups to prevent the problems before they get worse. Your business can’t run on toxic parts.
Additionally, my PTV Method™ can help your low performers become high performers faster than any other sales method out there. Get them the skills and behaviors they need to excel!
- LOW PERFORMERS ATTACK HIGH PERFORMERS
- It’s inevitable but the human race and even water for that matter follows the path of least resistance. Therefore, your low performers, will try to attack the high performers first to see if they can get them to quit before they will ever try to upskill and learn new behaviors. The pain of staying the same is less than the pain of changing for low performers.
- Most companies don’t do anything about this stage and they find it to be too much energy to catch the bad actors. So they inevitably allow this situation to grow into phase 2.
- HIGH PERFORMERS WILL COMMUNICATE
- The high performers don’t like drama because it slows them down and wastes precious mental energy that they use to be more thoughtful with customers versus low performers.
- You can combat this phase by listening to the high performers and insulating them. But most startups don’t have qualified HR personnel or resources and mislabel this communication as complaining.
- This has to be the hardest phase to deal with. As a startup you are going to have to learn discernment and step in quickly or else this will escalate to HR.
- HR WILL IGNORE IT
- If your HR team doesn’t know how to handle this issue, believe me you will know. Incapable HR teams try to cover up the issue and in the end this tells the team that it’s ok to mistreat people and more bad behavior will occur.
- At one company this happened to me and the low performer lied about their performance and management and HR covered for him and tried to make me out to be the problem.
- Then I got a call from the CEO that the same group of people wrongfully paid themselves $100k in commissions and they were all fired
- THE HIGH PERFORMER WILL LEAVE
- If you don’t come to the aid of the high performer after HR failed them then they will fight until they find something else and leave.
- You leadership just officially created the toxic sales culture because now that the low performers know they can make a person leave, they will do it again and again.
- CONGRATS YOU JUST CREATED A TOXIC SALES CULTURE
Download the eBook!
