Motivate Your Sales Team in a Challenging Economy

The economy may take one step forward and 12 steps back, but you still need your sales team to bring home the bacon. They’re slugging it out, day after day, listening to their prospects tell them the same excuses. The excuses and the lack of sales (as well as decreasing personal income) have the team down in the dumps. Motivated? Not so much.

So what can you do to help boost your people’s lagging spirits? Well, the fact is that true motivation comes from within and if your people aren’t motivated, they need to start working on themselves. But you can create an environment that is more likely to see them pick themselves up from the floor, dust themselves off, and say, “Today is a new day and I’m going to make it happen!” Here are six steps you can take to help your salespeople get themselves motivated.

1. Check Your Attitude

What’s your attitude like on a daily basis? A positive and encouraging leader is more likely to see his or her team feeling motivated than a depressed worry-wart. That doesn’t mean you should be fiddling and laughing as Rome burns, but consistent discussions that sound like, “If sales don’t pick up, we’re all going down the tubes together,” are unlikely to send the team out with the right attitude. Look for what your team is doing right, even if it’s not currently producing the right results. Acknowledge wins, even little wins, publicly and loudly. As a leader, you must create the vision of what success looks like and share it with the team constantly so they know the direction they need to head in.

2. Ask Your Team

In my experience as a sales consultant, I often work with business owners who hire sales reps and feel their job is done. Sales reps often need tools and without those tools they’re unlikely to succeed. Lack of tools to succeed equals lack of motivation. Laptops? Training? Leads? Marketing materials? By asking the team what they need, they feel included, and sales reps that feel their opinions and needs are being considered are far more likely to maintain a positive attitude than the reps who are made to feel they should consider themselves lucky that they have a job at all.

3. Help Your Reps Close Business

Sales reps often need help in their quest to close business. Sometimes it means bringing in someone in upper management to cement the relationship with a prospect. Something as simple as a weekly pipeline review meeting that offers the reps ideas and strategies on how to move sales forward can make them feel like they’re not alone and that the company is trying to help them succeed, which can help to improve morale and motivation.

4. Compensation

This one should be obvious, but many companies have compensation plans that simply do not adequately reward the reps for their work. For example, a straight salary, although attractive to the rep, is an incentive to be lazy. A highly leveraged commission plan that offers impossible-to-hit quotas serves as a demotivator rather than the opposite. Want to make certain your salespeople’s motivation levels stay low? Make sure they have a hard time making money. The best companies know that if they help their salespeople make money, the company makes money, too.

5. Goal Setting

Salespeople are typically very goal oriented. If they’re not, they probably shouldn’t be in sales. A salesperson without clearly defined and agreed upon goals is like a ship without a rudder. When was the last time you sat down with each of your salespeople and helped them set realistic goals…not just for results but for daily activity? Most sales managers manage by results. “O’Brien… you haven’t closed a sale in three weeks. Better get on the stick or there are going to be some changes made around here.” The smart manager knows that the right activity produces the right results.

6. Incentives, Bonuses, and Contests

Salespeople are often very competitive. Again, if they’re not, they probably shouldn’t be in sales. Knowing that their efforts will not only result in them getting paid, but also possibly win them a night at the theatre, a trip to the Bahamas, or something as simple as the team lunch with the boss (boss’s treat!) can help to keep the team focused and motivated. Caution: There’s an art to developing contests and you need to pay careful attention to how someone wins the contest. In some organizations the same person, or couple of people, win every contest. This is great for that person (or those people) but actually demotivates the rest of the team. Catalog contests, where everyone can win prizes based on accumulating points, have always been among my favorites.

Finally, help your salespeople find all the little things they can do, on an almost daily basis, to motivate themselves. Here’s a partial list:

• Forget past failures
• Review and remember successes
• Accept responsibility for yourself and your own motivation and success
• Imagine how you would feel and act if it was impossible to fail
• Realize the myth of overnight success
• Get rid of negative self-talk (the little voice in your head that says, “Loser” or “Idiot”)
• Stay active. Sitting around the office complaining is unlikely to help you succeed
• Learn from your mistakes, but don’t use them to beat yourself up

The economy is still tough, but with your help, your team can be a highly motivated, high-performance machine.