Motivating a Sales Team
Motivating an Ambitious, Driven Team
Sales people value freedom and cannot be micromanaged. They want to know what the objectives are and what is expected of them but don’t want to be micromanaged.
Another common challenge is team cohesiveness. Effective sales professionals can be naturally competitive, and team unity and morale can suffer if you don’t handle this appropriately.
Motivating and Managing Your Sales Team
Use the strategies below to motivate and manage your sales team effectively.
- Lead by Example
One of the best things you can do for your sales team is to do what you say, and lead by example even if you don’t have a sales background. Do what you are expecting of your sales team to do.
Think about the behaviors or habits that you want to encourage, and make sure that you demonstrate these regularly. It’s important to embody these values, if you want your team to follow your lead.
- Develop Emotional Intelligence
Sales people are high in EQ and need managers with Strong Emotional Intelligence to successfully understand and manage them.
Sales people who are managed by Managers with higher Emotional Intelligence experienced an increased job satisfaction and greater team cohesiveness. Making the sales team aware of how other people behave, aware of their own actions and emotions, and how these affect others can help them perform better than those who lack this important skill.
- Build Good Work Relationships
Encourage good working relationships even if the team members might compete with one another. Competition must not be the key driving force to perform better.
This is important to ensure higher team morale, increased productivity, greater collaboration, and more freedom to focus on opportunities.
Good relationships also make it easier for teams to reach an agreement on group decisions.
To build stronger relationships, create opportunities for team bonding.
- Understand Your People’s Personalities
Understand the individual strengths of each sales professionals. This understanding will help you to customize your motivation and reward strategies.
- Tailor Rewards and Motivators
Each of your team members is unique, and they’re likely to be motivated by different things.
- Bonus and commission checks.
- Paid Trips
- Paid time off.
- Further training, or advanced career development.
- Learning or certification opportunities.
- Attending conferences or membership in a prestigious business group
- Small gifts.
- Create Competition
People like to win. Take advantage of sales people’s natural competitiveness and create healthy competition as a way to engage your people, boost morale, and make work more fun. Competitions are also excellent for improving performance during slow periods.
- Recognize Achievements
One of the best ways to motivate your sales team members is to recognize their achievements on a regular basis.
Celebrate every win.
Praise the person with the win
Team Recognition is a powerful motivator.
