Keeping your sales team engaged and motivated can be a very challenging task. Many sales managers often go to the extremes to boost their team’s productivity, including huge commissions, extravagant overseas business trips and dramatic kickoff meetings. But flashy and glamorous tactics can wear off quite easily in the long run.
The truth is that your sales teams and representatives are often bombarded by external factors that could be affecting their engagement and motivation. It could be frustrating customers, market barriers or personal dilemmas impacting their ability to sell effectively. Not only that, every individual sales member requires different rewards, incentives and motivational strategies.
To help you engage and motivate your sales team for peak performance at all levels within the organisation, check out the important tips below!
Build Trusting Relationships
Building trust is crucial if you want to improve your sales team’s motivation. If there’s a lack of trust within your colleagues and they don’t believe you have their best interests at heart, then there’s bound to be a sense of disillusionment, or even resentment, which can hinder their work performance.
One of the best ways of building trusting relationships within your sales team is to be very direct and transparent. Employees don’t like it when you hide crucial information or fail to properly communicate relevant updates about the business. If there’s a pressing issue behind the scenes, it’s usually best to let your sales team know. In fact, by involving your sales team in the decision-making process, they can even provide insightful solutions to your problems!.
Another key aspect of building trust is to consistently offer help to your sales team members. Don’t scold or pressure them to finish tasks. You should try to resolve problems in an empathic manner and encourage them to reach their goals. That way, you can easily build trust and be a source of motivation for their work achievements. You’ll need to foster a comfortable working environment where your employees feel engaged and appreciated.
Establish Highly Driven Goals
To truly engage and motivate your sales team, you have to dive deeper into their core aspirations. What drives them internally? What inspires them to work harder? As the leader, you’ll need to understand both the personal and professional goals of your sales team. This will give valuable insight into what kind of person they are, and how they are powerfully motivated.
To understand each sales team member’s motivations, you should ask them these key questions: Are you motivated right now – if not, then why? What motivates you long term? What tactics do you employ to motivate yourself? How will I know if you are not motivated? What do you want me to do if you don’t appear motivated?
If they can’t seem to give you a concrete answer, you can give them a few days to mull over it. This self-reflection period can lead to more thoughtful answers, and therefore, a better understanding of your sales team. It’s important to know that each individual salesperson is motivated differently, whether it’s by financial incentives, sales quotas, broader organisational contributions, or more qualitative achievements.
In Dan Tyre’s HubSpot blog, he creates a framework for further deconstructing goals for your sales team, which can further improve the overall performance of your organisation.
Daily: This short-term goal is designed to provide an enjoyable break for the sales representative. The SPIF (sales performance incentive fund) should be something fun but lightweight, particularly since there’s not much effort required to earn it.
Weekly: This is a more tangible goal with defined business impact. You should set metrics for improvement, then work with your sales team on a structured plan to apply the necessary skills on a daily basis to achieve this goal throughout the week. The ideal rewards should be slightly more involved, such as a game of table tennis that will influence meaningful results.
Monthly: The largest of the three goals, monthly goals are accompanied by higher-value rewards based on extraordinary performance. Rather than using cash, it’s preferable to give physical SPIFSs such as Bluetooth speakers or TV sets. Every time your rep looks at that tangible item, they’ll remember the process they went through to earn it.
Give Personalised Rewards & Incentives
There’s no better way of engaging and motivating your sales team than letting your employees choose their own prizes and rewards. Since each individual sales member typically knows what they like and what they desire the most, it makes your job a whole lot easier. Not only that, it’s another effective way to design your own sales contest, which further empowers the organisational culture and spirit.
Firstly, you should ask your sales team if they need any motivation boosters. If they say yes, then you should provide a key task (objective) with a set timeframe or deadline, in exchange for a certain reward of their own choosing. It’s completely straightforward and highly powerful for both engaging and motivating your employees to get stuff done quickly! You can also make it fun and competitive by establishing teams.
When it comes to giving your sales team rewards and incentives, you can choose to get creative. Remember that rewards don’t have to be monetary – there are many other ways to recognise the accomplishments of your sales team! This includes offering to perform a task they hate (such as cold-calling or prospecting). You can even do a daring challenge if your sales team reaches a certain goal, such as shaving your head, singing a specific karaoke song or doing a funny dance. Holding fun work outings, such as trips to escape rooms and sports games is another way to engage and motivate your sales team, while boosting camaraderie among your colleagues. This can further involve paintball, bowling, go karting, dodgeball, etc.
Make Life Easier For Your Sales Team!
Prospecting and lead generation on LinkedIn can be an enormous, time-consuming hassle for many sales teams and professionals. Quite often, many salespeople are simply unengaged and demotivated during this process. Luckily, Leado is a sales automation software that enables you to reach potential clients much more easily, while adding great value to your pipeline.
Using your LinkedIn Business Profile and various engagement features, this tool allows you to schedule a sequence of automated messages that manage the top of funnel approach to your sales process. With Leado, you’ll acquire more customers beyond your direct network and find valuable opportunities in new markets. For more information, contact us now!
