Sales Team Motivation – Get More Results

As an entrepreneur your long term success is tied to your top performers and your whole team meeting long term and short term goals. Making sales team motivation a priority will have long term impact. Investing in the training of your people is a key among employee retention strategies.

More Than Goals

Sales goals are great, but they are just potential. Sales activities and sales quotas are important, but without the right actions they are just hopes and dreams. Hoping and dreaming is not a sales process.

As a business owner or a sales manager you need to have your sales reps (or yourself) meeting long term goals. Making calls without the ability to close deals is not going to pay the bills.

My name is Thom Singer, and in addition to hosting the Cool Things Entrepreneurs Do podcast for the past 4 and a half years (yep, we are up to episode 458)… I am a professional speaker who presents at company and association meetings. I have spent most of my career in sales and marketing, and I am a believer in the importance of sale team motivation and training.

Managing Your Potential

My main subject lately has been helping individuals and organizations focus on how to move across the gap between potential and performance . As I said, potential is great, but it does not equal results. When looking for sales success, you have to manage your potential.

Sales and marketing, when they are not working, are the most frustrating part of being a business owner or a manager. We need to hit our sales performance goals or we cannot continue to stay in business. Therefore, sales team motivation and working with your employees to ensure they are performing is key to the future of your company.

I have spent the last 2 years obsessed with potential. I have surveyed over 500 people about how they feel about their own potential and the results they have achieved in their careers. Additionally I have interviewed hundreds of successful people about how they have achieved so much. The information I have learned is amazing, and when I share this with sales team, or other groups, in an interactive discussion…. It is like hitting a “reset button” for many.

Sales Team Motivation

I believe the best companies know how to motivate your sales team. Those of you who are crushing it with new business development have a way to get their sales departments and each team member fired up to make sales calls and to hit their sales targets.

Team building is part of the story, but it is also about empowering each person to create their own path across the gap. This is where sales team motivation comes into play.

I call my program “The Paradox of Potential” because of how excited we get about potential. But let’s face it, Potential is false hope for too many people.

In conversations with people they admit to me that they are being held back by any number of things. Some are real, others are in their heads. But if you are working to motivate your sales team, then you have to accept that if the road block is real to that person, then it is real. Too many discredit the problems of others, since that same issue is not a concern for them.

Road Blocks

The top things people say are stopping them from achieving their potential are:

• Fear
• Lack of Focus / Distractions
• Worried about what other think
• No plan or goals
• Can’t get past their past
• Surrounded by naysayers / No support
• Procrastination
• Stuck in comfort zone
• Don’t have right connections / network
• It is not their priority

If you are looking for sales team motivation, you have to address these issues, or others, that your people are facing. Otherwise potential will be a continuing paradox.

Sales Motivation Tips

Three quick tips to motivate your sales team:

1. Hold regular meetings. Bring in outside speakers. Set the tone for open conversation. Create a supportive environment
2. Create sales contests and incentives. But don’t let competition take over teamwork. For a company to create sales team motivation that sticks, people have to feel good about the culture of where they work.
3. Track the metrics. Sales is a numbers game. I found that in running my own business….if I was busy I would not be doing the basic selling activities.