We often hear from sales managers the common misconception that top salespeople are born ‘with IT’ – a natural-born salesperson. “I need self-motivated people who won’t stop at nothing to achieve success.” they’ll say. We can’t find them! ” Certainly, there is a class of salesperson who can be described as this, but the premise is completely inaccurate.
Contrary to what many sales managers believe, motivation isn’t binary. It’s not something people either have or don’t have. Motivating sparks exist in nearly everyone. Developing and enhancing it is all that is needed.
In sales management, sales managers add fuel to the spark and keep the flame of motivation as high as possible for their teams.
It is important to motivate your sales representatives
Employee motivation leads to improved performance. We have coached thousands of sales teams and sales managers, and although ‘motivation’ isn’t the only key, it does play an important role in the culture.
Instead of relying only on recruits to be intrinsically motivated, sales managers must bring out the best in their reps.
The question is…how?
Here are two ways to motivate salespeople, backed by research in which we analyzed skills and behaviors, across numerous categories, for over 1,000 sales managers and reps.
To increase motivation across their teams, sales managers can use systematic methods, tactical activities, and interactions.
1. Provide regular coaching on an ongoing basis
Training isn’t something you do once. It’s not just something that occurs occasionally. Motivation clearly comes from the confidence of the sales rep, and confidence comes from proper training. In fact, our team is trained every single week, and often there are daily intervals of specialized training.
Is there anything the team needs to improve on? What specific area of yourself, or a member of your team, could you say needs improvement?
One of our clients Danni had a small team of 7 salespersons that had worked with the team for over 2 years. While they were consistent, they certainly weren’t breaking any records at the same time. Their motivation was going to come from some appropriate training, and we set up a training program inside Kajabi (learning management system) and gave the team access along with homework.
Every week as they completed their ‘end of week’ reports, they had to also note where they are at in the modules (based on homework we prescribed) and we had them note their biggest takeaways and applicable tactics. As they continued to learn, and bring questions to the meetings form the training, we saw improvements because of skillset… and we saw natural intrinsic motivation from their new profound sense of clarity.
2. Daily Meetings – Yep, Daily
This is the one area that initially gives us some pushback from a lot of salespersons, as well as leadership at times. “We are too busy…” “We already meet every week…” I have heard them all, and at one time I have echoed them as well.
Motivation is birthed from a number of sources, one being team culture and keeping the mission top of mind. A majority of our clients work remotely with their sales team, and then we have several that have in-house sales professionals as well. What we have found, is whether in person or using technology such as Zoom or Google meet, having a daily sales meeting at the same time each day, provides massive results in productivity and return on investment of time.
In addition, there is a method for ensuring that time is used efficiently and those daily meetings are truly effective. More on that, in another article, and of course, we cover this extensively with our private clients.
The goal of meetings should be to keep everyone on the same page and to keep the mission and projections at the forefront of everyone’s mind at all times.
Also, this is a great opportunity to discuss the training modules you gave as assignments in the previous step. A daily meeting never costs the company, they always produce a positive return on investment and time, and we have the data to prove it.
Those are only two of the steps we recommend to build motivation, but they are steps that can be applied instantly and measurable within a few days.
Are you building motivation with daily meetings and specialized training? Are you having trouble getting started?
If you would like more information on how to properly structure your sales team, properly ho effective daily meetings, and possibly even a training platform to make sure they excel in their sales, simply reach out to me.