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Motivating your sales team to increase revenues

Helen took over management of the sales team, and realized that while sales were steady they hadn’t grown over the last year. Existing clients were placing orders of about the same size, not purchasing more.
Kevin B. Lall

Helen took over management of the sales team, and realized that while sales were steady they hadn’t grown over the last year. Existing clients were placing orders of about the same size, not purchasing more. Calling a meeting with the sales team she realized that the previous manager was satisfied with not losing any existing clients. “What would get you excited about sales again?” Helen asked.

The team members said: “Appreciation for bringing in new clients or increasing sales”.

Helen invested time talking with the team about what would motivate them, and agreed to meet with them weekly to see what they needed and how she could help.

Sales is a tough job, and it’s hard keeping your sales team motivated. Rejection is a natural part of the job, and that can make some days more difficult than others. Developing a solid set of strategies for motivating your sales team will not only increase your bottom line, but will increase team member satisfaction, performance and retention.

Here are 10 tips on how you can Motivate Your Sales Team:

1.     Create a Motivational Environment:An environment that is not motivational promotes stagnation, procrastination, poor morale and high turn-over. Contrary, creating a motivational environment leads to people who are excited about what they do, are fired up towards shared and individual goals, and who are eager to do their best for their own personal and organizational success.

2.     Communicate to Motivate: Organizations with open, frequent communication tend to foster greater motivation. Encourage team members to communicate with you, and vice versa. With open communication you are better able to head off problems, learn what the team needs, and understand what will motivate both the team and individual members.

3.     Train Your Team: The greatest investment you can make in your team is on-going, continuous, repetitive training! This helps keep them motivated, invested in their work, and in a mindset of continuous improvement. Offer training and growth opportunities to your sales team continuously, and you will have them fired up and ready to take on new challenges.

4.     Emulate Best Practices:No need to reinvent the wheel. There are best practices that have been proven to motivate sales teams – seek them out and emulate them! Look to industry leaders, and even across industries, for examples of what motivated successful sales teams, and then find ways to bring those practices to your own organization.

5.     Provide Tools:No one can succeed without the right tools. Determining which tools your sales team need, and then providing those tools, is vital to motivation. A team that has the best tools at the right time is one that is excited about invested, productive work. Providing your team with the tools they need demonstrates organizational investment in their success, and the overall success of the company.

6.     Find Out What Motivates Employees: Each person is motivated by something entirely different. Before investing time and resources, take the time to discover from your people, what resources, tools, and incentives would be most motivating to each of them. Otherwise, it can become a costly exercise in futility.

7.     Tailor Rewards to the Employee:At best, a team is a group of individuals operating as a single unit, working toward shared goals. Take the time to not only motivate the team as a whole, but each individual – thereby creating a healthier overall team.

8.     Create Team Incentives:To keep everyone motivated in working toward common goals it is important to create team incentives. Your knowledge of what individual members and the entire team likes would be useful. Providing incentives for the whole team helps create shared goals versus people working for their own individual rewards.

9.     Implement Incentives: When you’ve determined what will motivate - it’s time to implement the incentives, which should be implemented in a way that is understandable, regular, and consistent. If employees don’t have faith in the incentive system, it will do little to motivate them.

10.  Recognize Achievements: One of the greatest motivating factor for most people is recognition. People want to know that they are noticed and it matters. In large organizations with broad goals, individual teams may feel lost in the shuffle. Take the time to recognize achievements by both individual employees and whole teams, and you will find your people are more motivated and invested in their work.

NEXT WEEK: Communication – Body Language; Non-Verbals is 90%!

DISCLAIMER: This article is presented by Fas Trac Inc. Neither the editor nor this newspaper is responsible for the content presented in this article. Fas Trac Inc. provides business consultancy for buying, streamlining, or selling a business; as well as conducting workshops on various subjects for business owners, management and employees. For more success please write fastracinc@shaw.ca.