Your best sales person is motivated and engaged today, or he or she would not be your best sales person. How can you make sure that your best sales person will be motivated and still your best sales person tomorrow? Challenging your best sales person to be comfortable with change is the best way to keep your best sales person at peak performance. Consider offering the following challenges to your best sales person and keep him or her committed.

Entice Your Best Sales Person to Implement New Approaches

Your best sales person became your best sales person because he or she found a successful approach to sales. As long as that approach is working, your best sales person is not likely to change it. However, there could be other approaches that work even better than that which he or she is currently using. Challenge your best sales person to move out of his or her comfort zone and make small updates to their approach, holding out the possibility that this could have even better results.

Make Opportunity Reviews a Regular Practice

Your best sales person treats each of his or her leads as an outstanding new opportunity, which is an attitude you want to encourage. At the same time, you do not want too much time to be spent chasing prospects who are not qualified to buy. Challenge your best sales person to do a thorough opportunity review on each lead that enters his or her pipeline, analyzing factors such as:

• How well qualified to buy is the lead?
• What obstacles must be overcome to reach a deal?
• Are there any risks to doing business with a particular lead?
• What is the likely timeline to a sale based on the lead’s industry?

When you challenge your best sales person to focus on leads with higher potential and lower opportunity costs you give him or her the tools to reach new sales milestones and higher compensation, while improving your organization’s efficiency in the process.

Share Training Responsibilities

As the sales manager you are the coach for your sales team; this aspect of your abilities is difficult to replace, but do you have to be the only trainer? Training new sales people and support staff from operations and other departments can be time-consuming. By sharing the responsibility for training on software and processes, you can challenge your best sales person by exposing him or her to greater responsibility while freeing more of your time for tasks that absolutely need your attention.

If you do decide to use training as a challenge for your best sales person, it is usually best to limit the time he or she devotes to this to between one to three hours a week. This ensures that your best sales person is not distracted from selling while still being exposed to the new challenge. 

Teach Your Best Sales Person How to Say No 

Your top sales person’s favorite word is “yes,” as in “Yes, I can deliver it Friday,” and “Yes, I can match price.” He or she relies on “yes” to make the sale. Yet sometimes, “yes” is not the best answer; your best sales person could be stretching his or her own resources and the resources of your organization with this one simple word. Challenge your best sales person to say no without losing the sale by offering solutions that fit all parties rather than letting customers have full control of the direction of a deal.

When considering new methods of motivation through challenge, remember that you want to challenge your best sales person but you do not want to burn him or her out. Continue to think of ways that you can challenge your best sales person, but do not throw all of your initiatives into action at once. By implementing incremental challenges, you can retain your best sales person and keep him or her committed.