You have tried numerous ways to help the team increase their sales, but it’s just not working.
Sales remain low, possibly even dropping lower, and your team’s motivation is almost non-existent.
How do you shift this around? How do you motivate your sales team and improve their performance?
The company still needs to generate revenue, and they look to you to get it done. You need to prove that you can do your job.
It can be a lot of pressure to perform well.
When there’s that much pressure, you may even end up using negative reinforcement to motivate your team members.
Using Fear and Pressure to Lead: Is It Worth the Struggle?
If you use negative reinforcement like fear or force, how well would it work?
Can people be motivated to provide excellent results by fear or excessive pressure?
And how long before they start to resent you and end up working only for the sake of working?
We understand that there is pressure to do your work and do it well. But we also genuinely believe that there is a better way to practice sales team leadership.
You can get better results without resorting to fear and force.
We have collected a list of ways that will work well to help you motivate your team members and help them want to excel. And they are all based on one theme: incentives.
Using Incentives to Lead
With these simple steps, you can incentivize people to work harder, smarter, and more effectively. And while you’re at it, you may also increase teamwork within your team.
So what are they?
One: Set Up a Call Blitz
Our first tip is all about encouraging some healthy competition within your team. Each of your team members has a target. So what if you could come together and make a sort of game out of working toward those targets?
You could set up a time for the team to get together. In that time, all of you (yes, including you as the leader) go through your contacts, make calls, reach out to your leads. Try to see who will get, let’s say, 10 leads in that time frame.
Throw in a reward for the one with the most closes among the team.
Call blitzes are fun — or at least they should be. Your team gets to work on the cold calls with others who also understand just how draining cold calls can be. They don’t have to do it alone during the call blitz.
Try this out a few times and see if it works. And if it does, then you can hold them regularly and increase your sales team’s motivation.
And that takes us to the next way to motivate your sales team: setting different kinds of goals.
Two: Create Stretch Goals
What happens to a team member’s motivation when they achieve their goals?
The motivation can reduce to almost nothing over time. The team member gets comfortable and stops working as hard as they did before.
That’s why we recommend having stretch goals — the kind of goals that will need your team members to stretch themselves further to achieve.
Offer incentives to go with these new goals to motivate and encourage the team to work toward them.
They could have their regular targets and goals, but there would be an additional ambitious goal that they know awaits shortly.
Once they reach the first target, the stretch goal would motivate them to keep going to unlock that other goal, and then another and another.
And this ultimately increases efficiency. They may uncover innovative ways to reach these goals that go beyond what your team has tried in the past.
As you experiment with stretch goals, there needs to be a way to enable accountability. You can do this with our third point.
Three: Set Up an Activity Dashboard
Are people doing what they say they’re doing?
Do they know how far their teammates have gone?
Or are they working in a silo, often getting away with doing very little without you knowing?
Set up a dashboard to track people’s activity — their calls, their emails, the research they have conducted, and other tasks they’ve done.
This dashboard will help you keep tabs on what everyone is doing and get the data you need to make decisions.
You may find out one of the team members has been slacking, for instance. You can start to think of ways to motivate them personally. Maybe they need a different form of motivation.
Once the team’s work is visible on a dashboard, it works as a personal motivation for everyone. No one wants to be seen as the slacker or the one that’s holding the team back, so people are bound to put in more work.
What about the things you can personally do to increase your team’s motivation?
Four: Lead by Example
Walk the talk.
Often people complain that their leaders just talk a lot but don’t know what it means to actually put in the work.
It’s easy to tell people what to do without showing any effort to do some work yourself.
So change this narrative with your team. Don’t be the boss that just speaks and never does.
Put in the work, and let the team members see that you are also working.
That way, when you ask them to deliver as well, they don’t wonder why you would tell them that, yet you never do any work that they can see.
And that’s it! With these four tips, you can increase your sales team motivation and see growth in your sales.
