7 years ago
February 21, 2017

4 Important Tips for Keeping Your Sales Team Motivated

Even with the best sales team in town, low morale can bring down your business and your employees. Learn how to motivate your team today!

Rhys Metler

While there may be about 22 million sales professionals in the U.S. right now, it’s not very surprising that the best sales people are often few and far between. Part of this is the individual, and some of the responsibility falls on the team manager. If you’re not motivating your sales team, you’re missing out not only on pushing them to be better at their job, but likely also creating a work environment that is less than ideal, leading to higher turnover rates.

Motivating a sales team effectively is a tall order, but it’s not an impossible job. Here are four important tips that will turn your team around and ensure that they have the best sales jobs in town.

1. Use a Variety of Methodologies

Simple, numbers-based financial rewards aren’t the way to go every time. While this can definitely motivate some employees, Business News Daily notes that such an incentive path isn’t fit for the entire team. If one person constantly outperforms the rest, others stop participating in the program, period. By only motivating the top performers, it also discourages employees from seeing themselves as a team with like-minded goals. One easy way to switch it up is to create team goals rather than individual goals, or offer rewards for certain progress gains rather than overall money goals. Experimenting with different metrics as a goal can yield surprising results.

2. Create Space to Relax

It’s unsurprising that being constantly on edge and working at 100% can wear employees down. An important aspect of motivating your team is allowing people the space to relax—as well as providing the tools to do so. A yoga room, beanbag chairs, ping pong tables—figure out what items suit your office and invest in a de-stressing atmosphere so your employees have somewhere to go after a difficult call. Not only that, but selling is a social business, and encouraging a social atmosphere can promote stronger performances.

3. Public Recognition for the Best Sales Jobs

Many sales people are competitive by nature. For this reason, it makes sense to publicly recognize success, and to do it consistently. It’s easy to get busy and skip several weekly recognitions in a row, but in doing so, you’ll also skip over an important part of keeping your team actively motivated. Keep track of weekly or monthly leaders on an award board so that they can be visually reminded of their successes.

4. A “No” Is a Good Thing!

How many times will a sales team have to hear “no” before they hear a “yes”? Rejection is a major part of a sales job, and it can often be a difficult hurdle for even experienced employees. Rewarding employees who receive the answer “no” doesn’t encourage them to make bad pitches—it encourages them to keep pitching, because no matter what, there is a reward at the end! Research shows that only about 20% of leads are ever followed up. This method can increase that number. Just make sure, of course, that the reward for “yes” is larger.

Creating an environment for the best sales jobs isn’t always easy, but it is possible. Sales recruitment agencies may be able to find the top candidates for you, but you are in charge of continuing to motivate them once you have them.

Rhys Metler

Rhys is a tenacious, top performing Senior Sales Recruiter with 15+ years of focused experience in the Digital Media, Mobile, Software, Technology and B2B verticals. He has a successful track record of headhunting top performing sales candidates for some of the most exciting brands in North America. He is a Certified Recruitment Specialist (CRS) and has expert experience in prospecting new business, client retention/renewals and managing top performing sales and recruitment teams. Rhys enjoys spending quality time with his wife, son, and daughters, BBQing on a hot summer day and tropical vacations.

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