Sales Team Motivation – Motivational Strategies For Your Team

Sales Team Motivation – Motivational Strategies For Sales

Sales team motivation drives the desire to achieve success during the sales process, ideally with a mutual benefit to seller and buyer. When your sales team is motivated, they are more likely to turn small wins into big successes and push the sales cycle forward. Unfortunately, motivation can be volatile, especially if your team has been affected by the inevitable slumps in close rates through the pandemic. It’s a well known fact that the failure to motivate sales teams has a direct effect on your profit margin. Consequently, salespeople need different motivational strategies from other parts of the business. And the longer you wait to motivate your sales team, the more you’re losing on key sales activities. So, how can you create engagement within your sales team members to help increase closing sales deals and drive motivation? Take a look at our thoughts below to help your sales reps perform better and hit their sales targets consistently and effectively.

How To Motivate a Sales Team

Every day, a sales rep is going to face customers who say no. This means handling rejection multiple times over and over again. Whether the reason is that key decision-makers are not ready to invest, or because the market is quiet due to summer seasonality, or maybe the sales team’s techniques are rusty, motivation has a ‘Catch 22’ effect – the more your team avoids the phone the more they don’t want to pick up the phone! And this can have a spirally effect on productivity. And don’t forget your sales professionals are people; they could be facing personal issues that drag them down or asking themselves questions about their professional life post Covid. While old-fashioned motivational tactics focused on the cold, hard cash, now it’s time to address the external pressures on your team members.

Money will not motivate your sales team to win because it fails to create employee happiness and recognition.

So let’s go at the heart of the problem to turn unmotivated team members into effective salespeople. Indeed, focusing on the sales metrics and results ignores the smaller, more time consuming sales steps that create a funnel. It’s the primary responsibility of sales managers to help control that key activities:

• Call time
• Time spent talking on the call vs. time spent listening to customers
• Developing tailored activities as customers progress through the sales cycle
• Utilizing micro-targeting activities with the support of marketing campaigns

Encouraging the team to create a schedule of their activities can help low performers improve their results. Additionally, employees who don’t have the highest performance often feel demotivated as they never receive recognition for their work. It can be highly beneficial to show appreciation for little victories and effective work style strategies. A team member is likely to feel inspired to achieve more if their current effort and skill set are already appreciated on the job.

Finally, experts believe that setting a strict sales path fails to consider employees’ personal goals and performance. Instead, we recommend sales managers enable each employee to take ownership of their part in the sales process. Trusting salespeople to develop the best paths to reach the business objectives can create an engaged and motivated sales team. Additionally, developing meaningful long-term goals for the sales reps, aligned both with the company’s vision and their employees’ career trajectory, can make it easier to cope with short-term frustrations.

Best Ways to Motivate a Sales Team

It is fair to say that you are unlikely to motivate your sales team without an adequate sales compensation plan. Indeed, 90% of the companies with top performance rely on incentive programs to reward their salespeople. Monetary rewards are effective, but employees often prefer different benefit sets. Salespeople can be motivated by different incentives, ranging from a sales contest for an extra paid-for vacation day to unique business perks, such as healthy food.

Team Based Competition for Sales Team Motivation
If you are concerned about isolating one winner within the team, you can extend the playing field to make it a team-based competition. Keeping the spirit of a sports game, encouraging reps to play games that are fun and good-hearted can increase sales team motivation in the team. These tactics focus on teamwork, in the long run, contributing to knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Clear, transparent, and open communication is a no brainer. Your team needs to buy in a new project to drive sales. Therefore, employees need to understand what to achieve and what success looks like. Direct reports can emphasize relevant success metrics and performance metrics per individual each time a new project arises.

How to Motivate a Sales Team When Sales Are Down

Is the sales team in a slump? Lack of motivation in the job, failure to hit performance targets, and lack of focus are signs that your team is suffering. The sooner sales leaders react, the quicker the business can recover. Experts focus on 5 motivation boosters to help employees:

1. Always recognize good performance rather than focusing on mistakes.
2. Focus on individual goals rather than the team as a whole.
3. Support salespeople with further training.
4. Talk to the team. Most people face problems within companies that their managers don’t know about.
5. Add value to the job, through a new mentoring service between team members or by introducing fun in a stressful business environment.

The Importance of Motivation

It’s in the best interests of a company to understand the importance of motivated employees. Motivation is at the heart of business success, whether it affects salespeople or the marketing team. Employee motivation affects the level of engagement, innovation, and performance they put in the company. In other words, when a business struggles with low levels of motivation, it will affect:

• Company Productivity – if sales are down, revenue will slump
• Turnover Rate – unhappy clients and unhappy sales people are churn risks- both need to feel nurtured!
• Absenteeism – under-performing sales reps have some of the highest numbers of sick days and that hurts your bottom line
• Company Reputation – sales reps are market facing and a flourishing executive is a great advertisement for our company
• The Ability for Staff to Innovate – the closest employee to the coal face- sales reps are in a useful position to feed back product improvements and competitors strategies to the Board

A company that doesn’t know how to lead with a vision and added value for the employees as ways to motivate is unlikely to survive in the long run. Indeed, when employees lose their sales motivation, their performance suffers as both the productivity and creativity drops. They become less engaged, which can drive a high turnover rate or absenteeism. The loss of engagement could directly impact clients, affecting the brand’s reputation.

Motivational Letter to the Sales Team

Salespeople play a crucial role in the company and they need to understand the important role they play in the company’s wider strategy and feel valued. A great way to do this is to tell them so publicly and proudly with a motivational letter or post to the team. This can create a magic moment which converts directly to a sales person’s mood with their clients. Paying attention to content and tone and ensuring the right sales behaviour is called out, can go a long way in making a sales person feel valued.

The letter should be positive, focused on the important micro and macro goals as well as help them overcome their current challenges. It’s a great way to share sales wins and replicable tips and tricks to help salespeople progress on the more tedious aspects of the sales funnel like call time and stage progressions.

Sales Manager Motivational Quotes

Wise words can help find inspiration to climb out of the slump and are a useful way to motivate sales teams in company meetings and conferences. We’ve compiled some of our favorites:

“Approach each customer with the idea of helping her or her solve a problem or achieve a goal, not of selling a product or service.”

– Brian Tracy

“Practice is just as valuable as a sale. The sale will make you a living; the skill will make you a fortune.”

– Jim Rohn

“Care enough to create value for customers. If you get that part right, selling is easy.”

– Anthony Lannarino

“Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”

– Winston Churchill

“Opportunities are often disguised as hard work, so most people don;’t recognize them.”

– Ann Landers

Sales Team Motivation Consulting

Motivation is at the heart of successful sales for your business. And it is the role of the business leader to go above and beyond to ensure employees stay motivated, especially when things get tough. From a targeted letter that can brighten the sales team’s mood to training on how to engage best practices, sales leaders have a range of tools to maintain and recover lost motivation and ensure your company stays in profit. If you or your team could benefit from sales consultancy to focus on your sales team motivation then contact us today!