If you want to get the most out of your sales department, you need to make sure you are properly motivating your sales team to do their best and achieve new heights. Motivating your sales team will spur them on to keep being successful during the good times, give them an incentive to keep working hard when sales are low and will help keep their morale high no matter what is happening around them. By keeping your workers happy and focused, you’ll help them to sell more as well as creating a work environment that encourages your star performers to stay and continue working for you. With many companies interested in hiring your star performer’s motivation is important not just to get the best out of them but also to keep them working for you.

• Step 1: Create an effective commission structure

  Motivating your sales team requires a great commission structure that encourages them to go after the big sales. To do this you need to make sure your commission structure rewards people proportionately more for landing the larger deals. If you are rewarding people better for making smaller deals then they’ll never push themselves to make more, resulting in a higher number of smaller deals. This is not efficient and will drive up the costs for your company – why would you want to manage 100 clients if you could get the same income from managing 10? Make sure your commission structure reflects the strategy that you want your sales team to take. Another example would be that you have a new product that you want them to push hard – a great way of motivating your sales team to do this is to offer a higher commission for selling this product for a time.

• Step 2: Offer extra weekly and monthly incentives

  To keep motivating your sales team week in and week out you’ll want to offer some extra incentives to the highest performers. This could be anything from vouchers, to free coffee, to an extra day off. It is important that these extra incentives go only to the best performers in that week or month as this will promote healthy competition and remind people regularly of what they’re working for. When it comes to choosing incentives for great monthly or quarterly performance, it is very important to find out what motivates your sales team, by talking to them and finding out what they think makes the most exciting incentive scheme you’ll be able to offer things that motivate them better.

• Step 3: Create an environment of encouragement

  Incentives and commission are a great way of motivating your sales team but unless they’re in an environment where they feel able to fail, they will never go for the biggest sales or clients. The more your team feel happy to take risks the more they’ll stretch themselves to higher performance levels and the better your company will do. Once you have a team that are willing to risk failing you’ll soon find that they start to regularly get bigger and bigger clients and your market share will rise as their confidence does.

While these three steps are a simple way to start motivating your sales team, it is worth remembering that every person, every team and every company is different. These are broad steps and the details of the incentives, commission structure and team environment will all vary depending on your company culture and what motivates the specific individuals in your team. The best thing you can do is to find out from your team themselves what they find motivates them most – then put it into action.