Instead of just feeling guilty about tasks you put off, analyze the root cause. Procrastination often signals a lack of belief in an activity's value, a skills gap, or fear. Identifying the "why" behind your delay transforms it from a failure into a diagnostic tool for targeted improvement.
Mid-year, review your performance as if you were an opposing football team. Identify your predictable strengths that a competitor would want to neutralize and your weaknesses they would exploit. This objective analysis reveals areas for improvement and opportunities to leverage.
To conduct a structured self-review, identify 20 key sales elements—from mindset to closing—and rate yourself from 1 to 5 on each. This creates a 100-point scale that clearly highlights your top-performing areas (the 5s to double down on) and your most critical development needs (the 2s and 3s).
To overcome personal bias during a review, frame your challenge as a problem a client is facing and ask, "What advice would I give them?" This mental shift enables rigorous honesty and clearer, more actionable solutions for your own performance issues, bypassing ego and excuses.
A common, yet often unnoticed, sales killer is ceasing the very activities that built a strong pipeline. Reps prospect hard when they need business, then stop once they get busy serving new clients, creating a boom-bust cycle. A mid-year review should identify effective past activities that have been abandoned.