Sales Managers, Do You Know How to Motivate Your Sales Team?
I’ll hit the gym every day for 3 hours… I’ll stop drinking so much on Mondays… I’ll call 85 new leads a day… I’ll finally own (or maybe just drive) a Ferrari…
The first week of January is filled with New Year’s resolutions, also known as empty promises. Did you know that only 8% of Americans are successful in sticking to their resolutions? That stat may sound shockingly depressing, but I think I know why we are all such failures.
It’s a sheer lack of motivation, my friends.
So this New Year’s help your sales team in reaching any sales resolutions they may have set by keeping them motivated for success throughout the year.
Besides getting them all to use Spiro to help organize their sales life and keep up the momentum, here are some other ways to motivate your sales team in 2017:
Help Manage Outside Distractions
As a manager, you need to sometimes play interference when another department is hijacking your rep’s time. If Bob from Marketing keeps approaching a guy on your team to help with a marketing project, although it may be time-worthy to be collaborative, it can also be valuable time taken away from actually selling. It’s motivating for someone you manage to know that you have their back and will step in to prevent their momentum from being derailed.
Lay Out Your Retention Strategy
If you want your team to stay focused on their goals and motivate your sales team to work harder you need to eliminate unnecessary stress about their job security. Be completely transparent about your company’s retention policy, and lay it out on the table what they need to do to keep working for you. Make sure your retention policy is one that handsomely rewards the kick-ass star sellers, and keeps them motivated to work hard.
Have a Plan to Combat Demotivating Factors
Instead of always talking about what carrots help motivate your team, talk about the flip side of that coin. Sit each rep down one-on-one and ask them what are the unmotivating forces in their work life. Then come up with a specific plan on how to combat those pain points. Hopefully their unmotivating factors are something you can help to fix – like setting more realistic goals or finding a way to streamline mundane data entry, and not something like “fire John from Accounting”.
Motivational Sales Quotes
This is the easy one. Have a whiteboard in your office? Great! Then put up a motivational quote on there once a week. It may sound cheesy, but people do respond to inspirational quotes. If this feels too superficial for you, try sharing more sales success stories with the team. People find motivation in other’s successes as well.
All or Nothing Rewards
If you are trying to motivate your team, then why not do it as a group effort? Set up specific team rewards that only come into play if all the reps work together. Say, they all hit 80% of their Q1 goal, then you promise to find some money in the budget to reward the whole team. But nobody gets a dime unless every single salesperson makes the baseline 80% target. This helps build peer to peer motivation. Then couple that with internal competition and the fear of letting someone else down, and you are sure to keep the whole team energized.
Keep Yourself Motivated
If you want to succeed as a manager, you NEED your team to succeed. It’s a simple formula. If they all exceed their goals, then you will too. It’s in your best interest for them to meet their quota, and therefore you should have genuine interest in helping them be their best. You have to be the cheerleader for them, and you are paid handsomely to do so. Motivation begets motivation. And it all starts with you, manager. Use these tips and motivate your sales team.
