“Getting Your Sales Team Motivated” by Bill Leesman
Everyone wants to know “how do I motivate my sales team”?
The better question is can you?
My response is no. Yes, you can micro-manage, push and bully your team to complete the steps necessary to meet your work expectations, but these methods will not create long term success. Eventually your most entrepreneurial Sales people will look for greener pastures and you will be left with a rotating door of junior people looking to get their foot in the sales door.
So, what are you to do? Two words – inspiration and opportunity.
First, inspiration. You must find a way to build a vision of success for your sales people. However,, not as you want it, but how they define it. People get into sales for the potential lifestyle that sales can provide; namely more income or more time freedom or both. You must find ways to feed those dreams. This is the easy part.
The hard part is providing the opportunity. Not only must you feed the dream, you must provide the opportunity to achieve it. How do you do that?
1. Provide a compensation structure that is fueled by success and results, but also attainable.
However, a good balance between secure pay and incentive based compensation is critical. If it is too weighted to either side you either have no incentive to achieve or you have Sales people trying to figure out how to survive rather than build a solid book of business.
2. Provide the tools to achieve.
No matter the profession, everybody gains confidence with the best tools at hand. For Sales people that requires presentation materials that are professional in appearance and content.
3. Ongoing Education
Athletes undertake a preseason and continue practice throughout the season. Why? They do it to train their bodies to naturally respond to every situation. Sales people also have to have ongoing education and practice to train their minds to respond to all situations they will face.
4. A Solid Product/Service
You must also provide quality products and services on the back end of sales. Being able to proudly go into a prospect with the knowledge that what they say is true will add a tremendous amount of momentum to your team.
So, motivation is not possible; it is internally driven and ultimately up to the Sales professional. Inspiration and opportunity, however, can create motivation and therefore success for your team and your business.