If you are worried that your sales team productivity is slipping despite a full tech stack and a steady stream of leads, you might be tempted to blame your staff. But before labelling a team as ‘lazy,’ leaders need to look at whether their management style is actually incentivizing the wrong behaviours.
It’s rarely that simple.
Why Short-Term Pressure Kills Sales Team Productivity
Salespeople make calculated decisions about where to spend their time to survive the quarter. When leadership increases pressure, it forces short-term thinking. True sales team productivity is often sacrificed at the altar of immediate targets, making a rational response look like laziness.
They’re not lazy. They’re making calculated decisions about where to spend their time.
I’ve seen sellers avoid following up leads just based on their gut feeling of likelihood of converting now. If a lead doesn’t look like it will close quickly, it gets deprioritised. Not because the seller is lazy. Because they’re trying to survive.
That behaviour gets reinforced by leadership. When numbers aren’t where they need to be, pressure increases. And increased pressure creates short-term thinking. The immediate target gets prioritised over long-term pipeline.
It looks like laziness. It’s actually a rational response to how they’re being managed.
How Inbound Leads Can Erode Sales Team Productivity
Here’s where it does get complicated.
If you have a warm flow of inbound leads that convert more easily, over time sales teams can lose the art of prospecting. They don’t need to find their own opportunities because opportunities keep arriving.
Inbound is brilliant, but it can create an order-taking culture. When opportunities arrive without effort, the ‘prospecting muscle’ atrophies. To maintain sales team productivity, sellers must keep the art of the hunt alive, even when the inbound flow is strong.
Sellers wait for leads instead of hunting for them. They lose the muscle for outbound. They forget how to start conversations from scratch.
Then when inbound slows down or leads get harder to convert, they struggle. And leadership calls them lazy.
They’re not lazy. They’ve been conditioned by an environment that didn’t require them to prospect.
Why Activity Targets Are the Enemy of Sales Team Productivity
Here’s another problem.
When companies try to fix this, they often introduce activity targets. Make 50 calls a day. Send 200 emails a week. Log everything in the CRM.
This turns skilled sellers into compliance machines. They hit the numbers but the quality drops. They’re going through the motions to satisfy a metric, not to build pipeline.
Activity targets measure effort, not effectiveness. And when sellers are being measured on effort, they optimise for looking busy rather than being productive.
This isn’t just a feeling; the data backs it up. According to Gartner’s research on sales effectiveness, high-performing sales organizations focus on ‘seller enablement’ rather than ‘seller policing.’ They’ve found that when salespeople are burdened by excessive internal reporting and rigid activity quotas, their actual time spent in front of customers, the true driver of sales team productivity, drops significantly.
The Real Issue Is Culture
Are all salespeople lazy?
No. But sales culture can make it look like they are.
The goals, metrics and structure create the behaviour. If you reward short-term closes, you get short-term thinking, if you provide endless inbound leads, you get order-takers. If you measure activity over outcomes, you get box-ticking.
The sellers aren’t broken. The system is.
What I Believe
Every salesperson should have the skills to prospect. However, they need to understand that the ‘old’ way isn’t coming back. As we explored in our analysis of why B2B cold outreach is failing, the modern seller needs to build recognition before they ever pick up the phone.
Most salespeople have it. Or had it. But over time, the goals, metrics and comfort of having an inbound engine can undermine the capability of great sellers.
Companies need to watch that their activity targets and inbound reliance don’t erode the skills that made their salespeople effective in the first place.
What To Do About It
Keep prospecting skills sharp even when inbound is flowing. Don’t let your team become dependent on leads arriving.
Look at your incentives. Are you rewarding short-term closes over long-term pipeline building? If so, expect short-term behaviour.
Be careful with activity targets. They can turn skilled sellers into box-tickers. Measure outcomes and quality, not just volume.
When leads aren’t converting, ask whether it’s the sellers or the system. Often the culture and pressure are creating the behaviour you’re complaining about.
Before you call your sales team lazy, look at what you’ve built around them.