If your sales team is going through a sluggish period, don’t just sit around and wait for them to snap out of it. Employ the following three quick fixes to whip your team back into shape and start getting the results you need.

Focus on Goals

A lack of focus can keep good sales people from reaching their potential, but you as a manager can help them to regain that focus by emphasizing goal setting.

Goal setting is most effective when goals are written down, clearly defined, and reviewed on a regular basis. Sales team meetings are a perfect place to talk about goals. Goals should be specific and easy to measure. For instance, instead of setting a goal of improving overall performance, set a goal to increase B2B sales by 8 percent in November. This is a quantifiable, clear goal, and it gives a person something specific to work towards.

Yes, you can set goals for your sales team, but they’ll probably work harder and be more successful if they set their own goals. That said, if you have sales team members who always shoot low, encourage them to stretch themselves with their goals. And that leads us to our second quick fix: reward successes.

Reward Success

We live in an age of emphasis on self-esteem, but that doesn’t mean we need to celebrate mediocrity. When your sales team members reach their specific goals, offer tangible, meaningful rewards in addition to verbal praise, but don’t offer prizes or rewards when your sales team falls short of their goals. For those who follow through and genuinely meet their goals, you could offer rewards like tickets to a game, bonuses, framed certificates, or even vacations. Whatever you use, make sure you explicitly state that the reward is recognition for achieving goals.

Not only will this motivate those who earn the rewards, but it will also motivate the other members of your sales team. Human nature is such that we want to achieve what others have done.

Encourage Healthy Competition

Good teachers have always recognized that a little healthy competition can go a long way in getting students to perform better and take their studies more seriously. As a sales manager, you can also adopt this quick fix to get your sales team moving in the right direction.

When you have your sales team meetings, talk about each team member’s goals and how they’re coming along. By discussing obstacles, successes, and techniques, team members will learn from one another and get ideas of how to deal with their own issues. Visual aids are very helpful when you want to encourage healthy competition. Just as elementary school teachers put sticker charts on the wall for their students, you can create some kind of visual aid to help your team members measure their progress (and the progress of their co-workers).

To keep your sales team members motivated, offer token rewards when they reach smaller milestones on the way to their goals. For example, give out smaller prizes (like movie tickets) during your team meetings to everyone who has met a particular objective. Watch your sales grow as your sales team members try to outperform each other for rewards and your praise and attention.

These three quick fixes (focusing on goals, rewarding success, and encouraging healthy competition) can really jump-start your team’s progress. They require a little planning on your part, but your efforts will really pay off in increased revenue and morale.