Found 0 posts
As a sales leader, motivation is your secret weapon to igniting your team’s passion and performance. Motivated sales teams are energized and engaged at work. They deliver results and take on challenges because they want to, not because they have to. Great leaders understand the power of motivation to spark enthusiasm, drive, and bold action within their teams, not just meet deadlines and targets. Being an effective leader means tapping into the internal motivators that inspire — and keep inspiring — high levels of employee engagement and performance.
So, how can you boost sales team motivation and sustain momentum?
The key is to understand what really motivates people in a meaningful and lasting way. According to the 2018 Gallup Employee Engagement Report, 34 percent of U.S. workers are engaged. This finding suggests that the traditional carrot-and-stick approach of rewards and punishment to motivate employees just isn’t working. It appears that high performing employees are driven by something deeper than just monetary rewards. In Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, author Daniel Pink draws on decades of scientific research to propose an upgraded model. He defines three elements of true motivation that drive success and employee satisfaction beyond external incentives like fame or fortune:
“(1) Autonomy — the desire to direct our own lives; (2) Mastery — the urge to make progress and get better at something that matters; and (3) Purpose — the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves.”
Applying these concepts, you can enhance sales team motivation with three easy strategies:
1. Autonomy: Empower your people to thrive on their own.
Giving employees a level of independence and the space to unleash their creativity and ambition is a great internal motivator. Equip your sales team with the tools, resources, and information needed to make decisions and solve problems on their own. Then let your people know that their path to success truly lies in their hands. They have the freedom to personalize their pitch, adjust their approach, and optimize solutions to reach and win more customers. They can decide what sales process works best for them, helping them close deals and meat sales quotas. The smarter and harder they work, the more they can make and advance their career — even becoming business owners someday. The sky’s the limit!
Employees also want a say in how they can contribute and add value. Rather than forcing them to fit into a narrow mold, listen to their ideas and understand what they find personally motivating. Let them play a part in shaping their role and offer opportunities to have influence and make an impact.
2. Mastery: Encourage your people to learn and grow — and make it fun!
Be a mentor and show your people that you’re invested in helping them achieve their career goals. Encourage team members to stretch and take risks that can accelerate their personal and professional growth. In sales, rejection is unavoidable, and some may become dejected or hold back due to the fear of failure. Find ways to turn these short-term setbacks into coaching opportunities. Help team members remain positive and not take a “no” personally, identify roadblocks and potential solutions, and think long-term beyond a single pitch. It’s easier to stay motivated through a sales rut and demonstrate resilience if people can learn from failure, improve, and make progress toward their sales goals and their personal goals.
To make learning fun, use gamification to add competitive elements and turn training and development activities into sport-like challenges. Let’s face it — salespeople like to win, so try these ideas to stoke their inner drive and improve employee engagement:
· Break up training into short modules or game levels that are progressively challenging.
· Create sales contests and offer rewards — badges, points, or power-ups — when they master a challenge and move up a level.
· Provide feedback during gameplay like timed quizzes to provide positive reinforcement or steer them in the right direction.
· Foster friendly competition through player rankings, leaderboards, progress bars, goal tracking statistics, milestone setting and tracking, and so on.
· Immerse participants in an entertaining story-like scenario to test them on skills they’ve learned.
3. Purpose: Ask each team member, “What is your why?”
There are many ways sales managers can motivate from the outside, but none are as powerful as helping team members discover their “why” — their internal motivation to pursue a goal regardless of the odds or obstacles. Employees who know their “why” gain deep satisfaction from doing meaningful work that brings them closer to achieving their dreams or making a difference in their own lives or the lives of those closest to them. Your role is to create a culture that focuses on the “why” and motivates your team to do work that matters, do it well, and keep doing it — even when things are tough. Team members who are internally motivated and focused on their personal goals are most likely to stay highly engaged, positioning them to become top performers.
By using these three strategies, you can boost sales team motivation to new heights, unleashing your people’s passion, purpose, and performance. The right internal motivators can yield profound benefits that last — higher employee engagement, more discretionary effort, greater productivity, better business outcomes, and employees feeling a deeper emotional commitment to their work and team.
Having a well-chosen, fully trained, sales team with the right attitude is essential if your organization is trying to increase sales. The sales team is the last line of defense. After all the investment your company has made toward developing, testing, and perfecting the product, branding, and promotional campaigns, it is the sales team who will ultimately make or break efforts to increase sales because they are the ones who will have direct contact with the customers. At Cydcor, a leader in outsourced sales, we’ve had more than 25 years’ experience building and growing great sales teams fully prepared to increase sales and achieve clients’ revenue growth goals.
Be Selective
Take the time to hire the right people. Be sure everyone on the team has clear expectations of what’s expected of them, simple goals, and ambitious but achievable targets – both for the team as a whole and for each individual salesperson. It’s okay (even great!) to have high standards, just make sure both sides are clear on those standards, nobody likes that kind of surprise.
Don’t be a stranger. Building a sales team positioned to increase sales is not a set it and forget it process. Hiring well is just the first step. Get to know your people. Talk to them. See them as individuals who bring their own individual strengths to the overall team. This will allow you to use them most effectively.
Get Everyone Trained Up to Speed
Once you have the right team in place, it’s important that they’re well trained and up-to-date on all sales strategies. Keep it simple, train your team only on what’s necessary to improve sales without added fluff, twists or turns. Since turnover is inevitable, make sure you have frequent trainings that are easily repeatable.
Also, remember that not everyone learns the same way. Some people learn better through presentations, others through reading materials. Some people have no problem just learning things conceptually and can then repeat them, but others may need to take a more hands-on approach with training. Have the most successful reps train the others and pay attention to make sure they’re getting it. You may even ask your team how they prefer to be taught. By involving them in the process you will get more buy in and participation.
Keep the Team Motivated
A team that’s eager to succeed is a must if you want to optimize your sales program. By keeping goals simple, clear and refreshed, you can always make sure your sales team knows what’s expected of them. Talk about goals daily. Reward and recognize those who increase sales and meet goals frequently. Healthy competition is good, but a collaborative environment where people are willing to help each other serves everyone, and that comes if everyone feels like their hard work is being rewarded.
Much like with training, different individual sales people will respond to different things. Everyone has their own carrot. Some are looking for recognition and respect, a star on the wall with their name on it. For others, bonuses and financial incentives may be the way for them to meet their full potential. Again, ask your team their preference. Get them involved in the process!
Ensure They’ve Got the Right Stuff
You’ll want to be sure to review your strategies to increase sales with the team to make sure all essential steps and needed communications are present in the sales process. Does the customer understand the product and service? Do they understand when they will receive the product or service? Will they need to do any follow-up? Don’t walk out the door until all of the customer’s questions are answered or, at least, until there’s a plan in place to get them answered.
Make sure your sales teams have the right tools, they need to be efficient. Making sure they have the right product information including pricing, a snapshot of the product or service benefits, pricing, and offer information is essential to help them improve sales and succeed.
There’s no one way to improve sales, but these strategies to build and maintain a great sales team should set you up for success. Hire the right people, train them well and keep them motivated, learn your customer and your product backwards and forward, and you should be well on your way to increase sales and achieve your business goals.
Sales is a unique profession that requires passion, extroversion and charisma. Leading a high-performing sales team and helping your direct reports get the best out of their own skills takes a little something extra. The good news is that as a sales team manager, you have that extra something inside you. Here are some tips on how you can take your own passion for your product or service and pass it along to your team members.
Set them up for success
Authenticity matters when it comes to sales. Few people come in with a fully developed talent for sales, so it’s important to meet your team members where they are and ask them what would be most helpful to them so they can achieve success. For some it will be a need for more product knowledge; for some it may be coaching or a “walk-along” with a high-performing team member.
Give them context
Your team will get better results if they have more information than simply a list of names or addresses. Help them understand the product they’re selling and how it compares to other similar products. Then assist them in finding reasons to be passionate about that product. This will drive good conversation, and thus increase conversions.
Provide them with training opportunities
It’s critical that you not only understand your team members’ unique needs but that you provide ongoing training to help them meet their goals and build confidence. Leading by example means that you also take training courses to enhance your knowledge of the latest news and best practices. That will help you to be a better mentor and a better sales professional in your own right.
Have high expectations of them
Your team will rise to the expectations you set, so set them high! On the other hand, don’t set them so high that your direct reports think they’re impossible to achieve. In order for those expectations to be met, you need to help your team feel supported and positively reinforced. Clearly articulate your goals and expectations and hold your representatives accountable for achieving them. Also, check out these motivating sales quotes that deliver motivation!
Let them specialize
Don’t treat everyone on your team the same. Some people understand certain business sectors better than others. Allow your specialists to take the lead in the area of their expertise. They may be able to help your other team members as well. The more your team understands about the product or service they’re selling, the better they’ll be at selling it.
What other tips do you have for leading a high-performing sales team? Share with Cydcor on Twitter @Cydcor.
We are Cydcor, the recognized leader in outsourced sales services located in Agoura Hills, CA. From our humble beginnings as an independent sales company based in Canada to garnering a reputation as the global leader in outsourced sales, Cydcor has come a long way. We’ve done this by having exceptional sales professionals and providing our clients with proven sales and marketing strategies that get results.