Motivating your salespeople is one of the most important factors in achieving success. While improving a team’s skill set is a fairly objective process, motivating them requires more elements.
They expect their leaders to have their backs and give them the motivation they need. It’s key for a company to be strong and keep growing.
Strategies to motivate your team:
- Build trust with your salespeople:
The key to motivation is trust. If your team doesn’t trust you and doesn’t believe you when you say you want the best for them, it will be hard for them to feel inspired and motivated by their work.
Sales managers have to build trust and then maintain it through a relationship of constant nurturing with the team. The most important thing is to be completely transparent. Simply talking about trust can be an excellent way to start off on the right foot.
- Ask your salespeople how they want you to lead the team:
successful managers adapt to their direct reports to get the best results from their team, rather than trying to force a single method of communication or a single strategy.
- Understand each person’s personal and professional goals:
You need to understand what they want to achieve in their personal and professional lives. Beyond learning more about each person’s personality, you’ll also gain a better understanding of what motivates them most.
Encouraging your reps to self-reflect will get you deeper answers, which will be better for both parties in the long run.
- Make sure your team is doing well:
Salespeople’s motivation suffers when they don’t take care of themselves. Your team’s results depend on its members’ sleep habits, exercise routines and diet.
- Set daily, weekly and monthly goals:
Different sales executives have different motivations: taking part in sales contests, hitting quota, improving quality, making an impact on the organization or earning more money, among other things.
- Identify whether there’s a widespread problem:
Before putting any strategy to raise the group’s enthusiasm into practice, it’s important to know whether there’s an issue with a particular worker; if it involves 3 or more people, there’s a problem across the whole team.
Organize a session where everyone can share their point of view, and ask human resources for help if necessary, so you can find out whether it’s a problem specific to the department and how you can solve it.
- Let team members choose their rewards:
Sales reps are the right people to choose the prizes; after all, they know what they want better than anyone.
– First, find out whether they’re lacking motivation. Ask them how they feel or whether they need a push.
– Next, ask them what they think the goal should be. Once they’ve defined it, ask them to choose a deadline.
– Finally, ask them which reward they prefer [within a defined budget]. This strategy is direct and effective.
- Offer original rewards:
Sometimes you may need to offer sales reps other kinds of motivation on top of a traditional compensation plan.
Here are some original incentives you can use: treating them to lunch, hiring a company to clean their house, providing a childcare service, giving them a day off.
Unlike a traditional cash prize, these rewards genuinely excite the entire team. Some examples: going to the movies, going bowling, throwing a party, volunteering, and so on.
When you really need to motivate your sales reps and show the level of commitment, you can go further with these fun and memorable ideas.
- Check that the tools they use are genuinely helpful:
Salespeople who truly spend most of their time selling feel more satisfied and, as a result, are more productive.
The key is to take administrative work off their plate, since that lets them focus on their core activities, and this is possible with the help of the right tools.
Assess whether they’re using outdated technology, spreadsheets for example, as this can create errors and slow the work down. You need to get powerful software that streamlines the process.
- Design a relevant, ongoing training plan:
Motivation also needs the backing of training. It’s impossible for salespeople to keep their techniques sharp if they don’t have the knowledge that keeps them up to date with today’s business world.
Create a training plan that is relevant and gives them what they need in terms of how customers behave today, the use of computer technology, and how to run a virtual closing process, among other topics you identify as important for your organization. Make sure the training is ongoing (at least quarterly or twice a year) and that they receive some kind of certificate they can add to their résumé.
- Let them know what they can expect in the medium to long term:
There’s nothing more motivating than an exciting professional future. On the other hand, when there’s nothing more on the horizon, your sales force will hardly want to stick around.
Sit down with each member of your team, and assess their opportunities for professional growth within the organization. Ideally you’ll have the help of someone from the human resources department, so they can strengthen the analysis of the growth plan.
Motivation is about finding what makes reps willing to put in the extra effort. Team members who don’t feel enthusiasm won’t improve their performance overnight. Find what motivates your workers. Those who have the self-discipline and the inner talent to work toward a reward will shine.
The benefits of motivating your salespeople
The reason to focus on this aspect is that, when you have motivation, you benefit from important advantages, chief among them:
- Efficiency. When you’re passionate about something, you don’t mind pouring your knowledge and time into it, so the work turns out much more efficient.
- Effectiveness. In the same way, if you feel satisfaction in your job, the odds of reaching your goals soar.
- Productivity. Given this greater efficiency and effectiveness, when there’s engagement in your work, your productivity rises by 12%.
- Energy. Likewise, having an exciting goal is synonymous with enthusiasm and energy. Don’t you feel more alive when you have a challenge you enjoy ahead of you?
- Stress management. If you’re in a state of demotivation, any obstacle seems insurmountable; motivation, on the other hand, lets you take a more positive perspective, seeing hurdles as opportunities and managing stress better.
- Interpersonal relationships. Among the advantages of workplace motivation, it’s also worth noting that it increases collaboration and teamwork.
- Professional success. As a consequence of all the above, if workplace motivation is high, the success rate you’ll achieve is in turn higher.
Maslow’s Pyramid
Maslow’s pyramid is a psychological theory, a theory about human motivation that was later expanded. This theory holds that, as basic needs are met, humans develop higher needs and desires.
According to Maslow, needs appear in succession, starting with the most elementary or lowest ones, of a physiological type. As they are satisfied to a certain degree, others of a higher category, of a more psychological nature, begin to appear.
People’s access to higher-level needs depends on their level of well-being. Everyone has basic needs, which doesn’t mean they go on to have self-actualization needs.
Maslow distinguishes a total of five types of needs:
1. Physiological needs:
These needs are the individual’s first priority and are related to their survival. Among them we can find, among others, needs such as food, quenching thirst, and so on.
Many of them are ignored because they are so routine; however, they are the basis of many other economic activities and, if they can’t be met, they can even endanger the individual’s life.
Physiological needs correspond to deprivations and are:
The need for movement, for clean air, for food, for elimination, for an adequate temperature, for rest.
2. Safety needs
These appear once the previous ones are relatively satisfied. They aren’t based so much on immediate satisfaction, but rather focus on satisfaction in the future.
Their satisfaction seeks the creation and maintenance of a state of order and security. Among them we find the need for stability, and the need for order and protection, among others.
3. Social needs
These are related to the human being’s need for companionship, to the emotional side and social participation.
This group includes the need to communicate with other people, to build emotional bonds, live in community, belong to a group and feel accepted within it, among others.
4. Recognition/esteem needs
Also known as ego or self-esteem needs. These needs lead, on the one hand, to a desire for strength, achievement, adequacy, mastery, competence, confidence, independence and freedom and, on the other, to a desire for reputation, prestige, dominance, recognition, importance or appreciation.
Satisfying these needs leads to feelings of self-confidence, of being useful and needed. But their frustration produces feelings of inferiority, weakness or helplessness which, in turn, give rise to discouraging and even compensatory or neurotic reactions.
5. Self-actualization needs
At this level, human beings need to transcend, to leave a mark, to create their own work, to unfold their talent to the fullest.
They involve the full realization of one’s own potential, that is, becoming everything one can be, in order to be at peace with oneself. It manifests in physical, psychological and social development alike.
⦁ Personal development
The opportunity for personal development and self-actualization turns out to be the most important source of satisfaction, above achievement. Salespeople, like any other worker, expect to be understood, to be valued, to belong to a group, to contribute, to be kept informed, to feel welcomed and protected, and so on.
The various characteristics of the salesperson and their impact on motivation lead to job satisfaction. If salespeople work happily, they feel more rewarded with a more or less normal income than when they’re unhappy at work.
- Self-esteem
Self-esteem refers to the set of attitudes that depend on perceptions, thoughts, evaluations, feelings and behavioral tendencies.
These are directed toward ourselves, toward our way of being and behaving, and toward the traits of our body and our character.
We can consider self-esteem as the subjective value of the human being, and within it lies the answer to the question: who am I? As a salesperson matures, they go through different professional phases that also influence their motivation:
- Exploration phase
The salesperson doesn’t have experience yet. What they value most is training, in addition to having an acceptable income level and opportunities for advancement.
- Establishment phase
The salesperson already has experience; they value and consider advancement because the possibilities are now tangible. If the salesperson sees that promotion isn’t coming, they’ll enter a phase of demotivation.
- Maintenance phase
The salesperson has grown and doesn’t have as many professional-development demands.
Demotivation can also occur on the salesperson’s part; there are a number of underlying causes that can lead to a salesperson’s demotivation:
⦁ No clear professional path.
⦁ Not being managed properly.
⦁ Boring work.
⦁ Not meeting financial needs.
⦁ Feeling discouraged with the company.
Career path and professional incentives
To achieve the set goals, sales management has to put together a motivation plan that works for the entire sales team.
To reach the goals set for the sales team successfully, there must be a good compensation policy in line with the market and the team’s needs.
- Compensation:
Compensation refers to the consideration a worker receives for having made their labor available to the employer.
The characteristics that identify a good commercial compensation system are:
- It has to be fair. You have to fairly reward the salesperson’s effort if they’ve met the sales goals.
- It has to be the same for the entire sales team.
- Compensation has to motivate. The salesperson has to feel constantly stimulated.
- The way compensation is established should be very simple to put into practice, since selling being a complex system, we need to make the compensation system tactical.
- Compensation should be flexible because of the ever-changing environment in which the profession operates. It should adapt easily to changes.