Sales: 4 Ways to Motivate Your Team for High Performance

There is no question that managing salespeople is one of the great mysteries of business ownership.  Salespeople are indeed a breed of their own, one that often small business entrepreneurs struggle to understand.

On a very simplistic level, it’s easy to keep things simple in managing salespeople.  They are motivated by money.  That’s true however, the flaw in motivating salespeople solely through their compensation is that it focuses both the salesperson and management’s attention only on the results of their efforts instead of the process they follow to achieve those results.

Most people, especially sale s folks, don’t lack a desire for money.  They lack the knowledge to find effective ways to earn it.

In my 20+ years of managing salespeople and 10 years of helping my customers manage salespeople using online CRM, I’ve seen firsthand how managing the steps in the sale s process and even basing compensation on the performance of the process vs.  results can lead to tremendously successful, high performing teams.

Following are 4 ways any business can motivate their team without hiring or firing anyone and without spending a mint.

1)      Break the Sale s Process Down and Set Goals within the Process

It sounds so simple but, in practice is quite difficult.  Because you are so conversant with the benefits of your product or service and the nuances of your customers, nothing seems to follow a standard linear process.  And therein lies the problem.  Your customers and your salespeople are dictating this crucial process in your business’ success.  You need to take control over it so that you can manage it.  Identify the things that your company and your sales rep are in control of that happen in virtually every sale and the typical sequence.  Begin to measure how many cold calls it takes to get an appointment for instance and set goals for each of these steps.

2)      Incentivize the Process

Once you’ve broken down your process and set goals, you need to reward those who perform.  Choose the points in the process that tend to be the bottleneck and provide strong incentives for those that outperform in these areas.  For instance, with most salespeople that generate their own leads, making their prospecting calls (cold calls) is normally the bottleneck.  It may make sense to provide an extra commission on sales to those reps that outperform here.  Of course, it doesn’t have to be a monetary reward.  It could be more leads or preferential territories, etc.

3)      Public Accountability and Praise

You can help your salespeople motivate themselves to focus on the most important parts of the process by measuring the process for the entire  team and sharing the results with everyone.  This way they begin to compete with each other.  They also begin to see how performance within the process goals you’ve set up correlates with sales performance.  Of course, you want to publicly praise not just the rep that closed a huge deal this month but, the rep that’s working the process hard and beating their goals too.

 

http://blog.vistage.com/business-leadership/4-ways-to-motivate-your-sale-team-for-high-performance/

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