When your inside sales reps are stuck inside your office all day, calling up leads, emailing them, and performing administrative tasks, it can take its toll on their motivation. They could start to get sick of the repetitive tasks. They could long to be out and about, travelling, and meeting clients face to face. Unfortunately, your sales can suffer due to this lack of motivation.
You need to learn how to motivate inside sales reps in order to increase sales at your company.
Use these tips to do exactly that.
Calling or emailing lead after lead, all day, every day can get pretty repetitive. Every call can meld together. And this repetition can be demoralizing.
Giving your inside sales reps the ability to visualize their sales performance in real time can reinvigorate them through a continuous feedback loop. If a sales person can pull up a graph showing that they successfully met their daily call benchmark or a graph showing how many appointments they’ve set, they’ll be more motivated to keep going.
Rejection in inside sales is also a top reason why sales reps lose motivation. If they keep getting hung up or brushed off during a call and they don’t know how to deal with the rejection, they could get in a serious slump.
No matter how great of an inside sales person someone is, rejection is part of the business. But it doesn’t have to be so crushing. Encourage rejection to power the next round of success in your sales team. Get your sales people to make the most out of their sales rejections, to use them as a way to learn and evolve—as a way to learn competitive intelligence, consumer insights, pain points, and other valuable knowledge that can be used to make more successful calls in the future. This will help them get over their fear of rejection, while helping you to increase sales at the same time. Teach your reps how to dig for answers when faced with rejection to learn why the answer is no.
Inside sales is one of the toughest of the different types of sales jobs. As such, sometimes the big wins are few and far between. And this can be discouraging. So instead of just celebrating the big wins like a sale being closed, celebrate the little ones too, like an appointment being set, a sales rep making more cold calls in a day than usual, or something else that will push them to keep going.
Most sales people, by nature, are competitive. Take advantage of this by building a healthy spirit of competition in your office. Create creative sales contests, which don’t have to cost a lot of money. Offer an extended lunch break, the opportunity to sleep in on a Friday, or a prime parking spot for a week to get your inside sales team’s competitive juices flowing.
Rather than learning how to motivate inside sales reps once they’re in a rut, learn how to prevent the lack of motivation to begin with. Hiring for cultural fit can ensure that you’re only hiring sales people who actually enjoy sitting in their offices all day and connecting with clients remotely.
This will reduce the risk that your sales reps will get sick of the roles and responsibilities that come with inside sales and start to long for overnight travel, face-to-face meetings, and more interactions.
Learning how to motivate inside sales reps to increase sales will need to be based on your sales reps’ personalities, your market, your compensation plan, and the products or services you sell. But these motivation tips have been highly successful for some sales teams, so they’re a good starting point.
Claire has 4+ years of experience in sales and recruitment. As a Director of Client Services, her main objective is to connect great people to great companies by building strong relationships with both top clients and candidates in the sales industry. She specializes in sales roles of all seniority levels for both enterprise and start-up clients North American wide. When Claire isn't networking with top talent, she enjoys being outdoors, traveling and spending time with friends & family.