Sales teams often thrive or crash because of their leaders. Leaders provide direction to sales objectives, as well as a frame of reference for employee behavior. Meanwhile, demotivated teams can result in low employee retention. According to a survey by The Bridge Group, in their pool of respondents from SaaS companies, the reported average turnover rate of sales representatives is 34 percent.
A sales team will be as motivated as they are inspired by their leaders. Good teams can weather periods of low sales, and a team is only motivated when they have leaders who understand how and why people choose to do what they do.
Good Leaders Have Concrete Goals
Successful leaders of sales teams are good salespeople themselves. They are able to convince their subordinates of the team’s goal for the year. They are also able to motivate through stories, providing concrete examples of why reaching specific milestones will lead to success.
To successfully lead a sales team, you must also stick to the vision you set for the sales period. Harvard’s Employee Engagement Study notes that more than half of their respondents said that individuals’ understanding of business goals significantly contribute to employee engagement. Employees that can state what is expected of them also demonstrate better performance.
Differentiated Motivation for Employees
Understanding your subordinates means knowing what works for each of them. In any team, there are high performing members, core members, and ones that fall a little behind. You must use different ways of motivating these three groups.
High performers are easy to prompt to action. These are individuals who are intrinsically motivated and need very little convincing to meet a sales goal. If you want to further motivate rainmakers, you can incentivize top performance with a recognition bonus, no ceilings on commissions, more time off, or a mentorship with a manager.
The bottom 20% are also relatively easy to motivate. This does not mean that they are weak or ineffectual salespersons, it just means that they’re not motivated by the status quo. They may be spurred to action by a financial incentive like a quarterly bonus, as this study from Harvard Business School shows.
Core members, the largest population, may be the most difficult to track. One way to keep yourself aware of what this group needs is by keeping communication lines open. Demonstrate that you can be easily reached by your employees, by having one-on-one meetings, weekly check-ins, or monthly catch-ups with middle managers.
You can also create a tiered incentive program. For example, for automobile retailers, a tier-one goal might be selling two units every month. Those who meet this can be given an equivalent dollar amount on top of their commission. A tier two-goal means doubling the number of units to sell, and doubling the reward, and so on. This allows people to achieve at a level that is comfortable for them while driving up sales in your company as a whole.
Conclusion
When making improvements to your employee motivation strategies, it’s important to consider their track record, personalities, and profile. Knowing who you lead will help you bring them to higher levels of performance at work.
One way to get the entire team on track is to have a sales training workshop that is useful for all types of experience levels. You want to make sure that your reps, from the most inexperienced to the most tenured, not only connect with the content, but adopt the skills necessary to meet your future revenue goals. The key is to partner with a sales training firm that understands recent discoveries in behavioral psychology and leverages techniques proven to help prospects see maximum value. They’ll also employ personality tests to determine the best way to communicate and motivate the team.
If you are on the lookout for more ways to create value within your team or company, get in touch with us today. We can help you through sales training, sales conversion playbooks, masterclasses and more, so let’s talk!
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We understand it can be difficult to know where to start when building a framework for sales conversations, so we’ve developed a Sales Conversation “Cheat Sheet” you can download HERE.