Motivate your sales team

How to motivate your sales team?

A motivated sales force can exceed your expectations for revenue and for profit. How do you motivate them to go above and beyond? Here are some ideas:

Foster a team environment

Coach and mentor them

Create some friendly competition

Listen to their pain points

Give them the tools they need to succeed

Show them the money and appreciation

1. Foster a team environment

Many companies find that a team mindset can provide great results.

Do your sales people feel like a team or is everyone out there as a lone ranger? Even if the nature of your business requires people to work individually there is value in having a shared sales goal and business identity.

When people communicate, they can also begin to collaborate better. Senior salespeople can help junior salespeople. Sales conferences, group training, team meetings, team building events, and social gatherings can all help you foster a better team environment.

2. Coach and Mentor Them

Sales is an evolving role. Today it’s not about just selling but about fostering relationships with customers. Foster relationships with your sales people and you’ll get better results from them just like you will with your clients.

Coaching and training sales staff can result in significant improvement in results. People respond to individual feedback on performance. You may consider implementing one-on-one meetings on a monthly basis with all of your salespeople, for example. This is where you can give praise when it’s due and help struggling salespeople overcome challenges as well.

3. Creating some friendly competition

Salespeople tend to be competitive by nature and motivated by money. Internal contests can inspire great results and can also be a great way to foster team collaboration, too. Regular contests can make a big difference in the mindset and the morale of your sales team.

4. Listen to their pain points

Regular sales staff meetings and individual one-on-one meetings can help address issues and problems that your salespeople are experiencing. Listen to your salespeople and act on their concerns. A happy and steam lined sales team leads to motivated and long lasting employees.

5. Give them the tools they need to succeed

Do you have outdated sales tools? Do your sales tracking, CRM, and order fulfillment tools help salespeople do their jobs or do they make life difficult or just add another step in their day? Upgrading to the sales right tools can help your staff become better at what they do. Your efforts of continuously improving processes in the company can translate to a salesperson being able to continuously improve his or her results.

6. Show them the money and appreciation

Recognize excellence with compensation. You can do this with cash, gifts, plaques of appreciation, and so on. This probably seems pretty obvious but how long has it been since you reviewed your company’s compensation plan?  Is it considered competitive for your industry? Are you rewarding the performers and inspiring those who are struggling to try a little harder? Regularly review compensation and incentives to make sure you continue to inspire people through rewarding excellence.

Whether you implement some of these suggestions or all of them, continually working to motivate your staff can yield some great results!

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