Every team has one.
Adequate. Never clearly failing. Not the problem you spend your nights worrying about. But also not someone you'd describe as "motivated" or "growing." They do exactly enough to avoid a performance conversation, and not a unit more.
Managing this person is genuinely one of the more difficult challenges in field sales management — because the usual tools don't apply. You can't put them on a PIP for mediocrity. You can't incentivise with money what isn't a money problem. And you can't inspire someone whose primary goal seems to be staying under the radar.
Here's how I'd approach it.
First: Diagnose Accurately
Not all "bare minimum" behaviour has the same cause. Getting it wrong means you'll apply the wrong intervention.
There are four common causes:
Disengagement: The job used to feel meaningful and no longer does. This often happens to reps who've been in the same role for three or more years with limited growth or recognition. They're not lazy — they're switched off.
Personal circumstances: Something outside work is consuming their bandwidth — family, health, financial stress. The work suffers as a result. This is temporary, but needs a different kind of conversation.
Capability ceiling: They're performing at close to their maximum. What looks like "not trying" is actually "trying and hitting a skill limit." Pushing harder won't work here — development will.
Deliberate coasting: They've calculated that doing the minimum is the rational choice, given the effort-reward ratio. This is the hardest to change and requires honest conversation about consequence.
A 15-minute conversation — genuinely curious, not accusatory — will usually reveal which category you're dealing with.
The Conversation Most Managers Avoid
The most common mistake is not having the direct conversation at all.
Managers hint. They make motivational speeches in team calls that everyone knows are aimed at one person. They track the metrics more visibly, hoping the rep notices. None of this works, because it's ambiguous. The rep can reasonably assume it's not directed at them.
The conversation that actually matters is one-to-one, specific, and curious:
"I want to talk about your performance over the last three months, and I want to hear your perspective before I share mine. How are you feeling about your work right now?"
That question — before you share any observation — will tell you more than any data point. The answer shapes everything that follows.
If It's Disengagement
The question to ask: is there something this person wants that the current role isn't giving them?
Some reps want visibility, recognition, or a sense of progress. They've been going to the same 50 outlets for two years with no acknowledgment that they're doing it well. Giving them a specific project — market development in a new sub-beat, mentoring a junior rep, running the scheme execution for a launch — can reactivate them quickly.
Recognition is cheap and massively underused. A phone call in front of the team costs nothing. It can turn around a person who's been coasting for months.
If It's Deliberate Coasting
This requires a different conversation — one that's honest about consequence without being threatening.
"I've noticed your outputs over the last quarter. I want to be direct: the level you're performing at isn't what I need in this role going forward. I'm not looking to manage you out — I'd rather see you succeed here. But if the performance doesn't shift in the next six weeks, it's going to show up in your rating and your growth here. What would it take to change that?"
The last question is the most important. Some people will tell you exactly what they need. Others will indicate that they're not interested in changing. Both are useful information.
The Limits of Your Influence
You cannot force someone to care about their job. You can create the conditions where caring becomes easier — clarity, recognition, consequence, development. You can hold them accountable to their commitments. You can be honest about the cost of coasting.
But if a person has fundamentally decided that this job isn't worth their full effort, no management technique will reverse that permanently. What you can do is make the decision clear: perform at the required level, or understand that it will affect your future here.
That clarity, delivered with respect and without drama, is the most professional thing you can offer.
What Not to Do
Don't ignore it and hope it resolves. It won't. And in six months, the rest of your team — who watches everything — will have adjusted their own effort downward in response.
Culture is built by what you tolerate as much as by what you promote.
Managing a team for the first time — or resetting after a tough stretch — takes more than good intentions. The New Manager Starter Kit is a complete 90-day guide: what to do in each phase, the conversations to have, the dos and don'ts, and what your RSM is actually judging you on.
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