As a sales manager, the need to motivate your sales team is one of your most pressing tasks. There are many ways that you can do this but from time to time even the most trusted ways to motivate your sales team fail to lift your team to better results. If this is happening to you, new sales people might be the competitors your team needs to get back on track. Fresh blood is a great motivator for naturally competitive sales people, and hiring the right sales people will motivate your sales team to better results across the board.

The Power of Peer Pressure

Peer pressure should never be underestimated as a way to motivate your sales team. When you bring fresh blood into the organization, your sales team will recognize that the new hires are peers to whose results their own results will now be compared. If you are not already using peer results as a way to motivate your sales team, now might be the time to consider new ways of fairly and openly making sales the competition that it is meant to be:

• Publicly post quarterly sales results for all of your sales representatives.
• Send out sales updates that include comparisons between your organization’s sales performance and the competition’s.
• Start tracking conversion rates for each sales representative and release that information on a regular basis.

While top sales people make it a habit to compare their performance to their peers’ privately, encouraging all representatives on your sales team to note these results openly against long-term peers and new hires should not be underestimated as a motivational tool.

Recruiting New Hires Consistently

In organizations that are posting healthy sales numbers, it isn’t uncommon for empty sales positions to go unfilled since there is not a direct need to hire additional sales staff. However, these empty seats can actually have a de-motivating effect on your sales team. Psychologically, unfilled positions send the message that the team is doing well enough, and does not need to do better to succeed. When you are trying to motivate your sales team, this is the last message you want to send.

Regularly recruiting new sales people avoids this unwanted impact on productivity. Even if your sales team is doing well enough, consider that any fresh blood you bring into your organization will be compensated primarily on results and will be bound to promote results from your sales team due to their competitive nature. Moreover, maintaining a regular recruiting strategy is more cost effective, as you’ll be sure to have properly motivated top sales people on staff when you need them most.

The Drive to Come Out on Top

Great sales people all have one thing in common: They want to be the best at what they do. By hiring new sales people with track records of results, you can motivate your sales team to do better through benchmarking their performance to the performance of new hires. This has a cascade effect since if you bring the right people to your sales team, these new hires will also consistently strive to do better.

By always looking for new ways to motivate your sales team, you can ensure that your sales numbers never start to slip. Regularly recruiting fresh blood is not only cost effective for your business, but it’s also an effective way to keep your sales team on its toes. Consider your current recruiting strategy and whether it might be time to bring new faces in to motivate your sales team.