Your company’s productivity and profitability are substantively higher if you have a motivated, engaged, and ambitious sales team. When you have a lazy sales force, chances are you won’t achieve your sales goals and your company’s morale will dip. To get your sales team to do better, you need to challenge your reps.

Here are some ways you can challenge your sales team.

Expectations

Sales people need a certain level of autonomy, but they shouldn’t be totally left to their own devices or their motivation will drop. To challenge your sales team, give clear expectations and properly communicate your sales goals. This might seem like a no-brainer, but you might forget to do this with high-performing reps who have been with you for a long time. Give them high-level objectives but don’t tell them how to do their jobs unless they ask for help. Micromanaging your sales team can lead to feelings of resentment and frustration.

New Sales Strategies

Often, your best sales people succeed because they have sales strategies that work. However, if these strategies are limiting their efforts, they can be missing out on big opportunities. To challenge your sales team, get them to move out of their comfort zone by trying new sales strategies. By giving them new methods of selling, you push them into thinking outside the box and inspiring them to achieve new goals.

Training

You don’t need to do all the training on your own. Challenge your sales team by giving your reps the responsibility of training new hires. This allows them to prove to themselves what they know, which will build confidence, and it will help them learn management skills.

Winning Back Clients

It’s never good when you lose clients to your competitors, but it’s a fact of doing business. That doesn’t mean you have to give up on them though. Instead, challenge your sales team to win those clients back. It’ll allow them to use different skills and give them a goal to work towards. You can even make it into a contest: whoever wins back a client first wins a big prize. It’s a win-win situation. You get your client back, and your sales team gets a boost in morale and a shiny gift.

Team Environment

Sales people are often lone wolves. Though this can be beneficial out in the field, it can be detrimental in the office. When sales people need to work together, they often argue and clash, leading to hostility and lowered morale. To avoid these problems, challenge your sales team by creating a team environment that is centred on working together. Team-building exercises, social events outside of the office, and brainstorming meetings can all help you get your sales reps working together in a harmonious way, which will increase productivity.

Tailored Motivators

No two sales people are alike, and they’re not going to be motivated by the same rewards. The best way to challenge your sales team to make them do better is to find out what motivates them. One person may appreciate additional career development opportunities while another might want more paid time off as a reward. Talk to your team members individually to find out what will make them work harder, and then try to make it happen. In order to challenge your sales team, you should be rewarding them for their achievements, but the way they’re rewarded could drastically differ from one to the other.

Timely but Rewarding Challenges

If you’re seeing your workplace morale dip below acceptable levels and it’s really starting to affect your profits, you need to challenge your sales team to do better. You don’t want to pile on too many new responsibilities at once, though, or you risk stressing them out, which isn’t good for business. Instead, offer timely but rewarding challenges that can enhance their professional development and give them more opportunities to succeed.