How To Motivate Your Sales Team

Motivation is an excellent tool for performance; motivating salespeople can help them work more efficiently and ultimately sell more products. First, understand the requirements of salespeople and advice on sales and customer collaboration. Then, motivate the most productive salespeople to sell more products and boost productivity.

Motivated employees work with good team spirit and usually aim to promote a company’s name and produce high-quality products. Motivation gives employees positive energy to work more and harder, thus increasing productivity and sales efficiency.

Having a good team is integral to winning. But talent only gets you so far. Those who succeed not only assemble talented teams, they motivate them. A team stocked with talented and motivated people is tough to beat.

Here Is How To Motivate Your Sales Team

1. Respect your team members

What is sauce for the goose, is sauce for the gander. Good managers and team leaders know that every team member is essential to the entire machine. Great managers make sure everyone on the team hears that message and knows it's true. Differences and divisions can tear any team apart--respecting and appreciating all your team members is the best way to keep that from happening.

2. Building trust

If you promised something, make sure you deliver. Don’t let your team members down. Keeping your word is about respect and trust. When you break your word, it gives a different picture of you. Therefore, you always have to offer something to make up for it. Your effort to make up for what has gone awry goes a long way to show that you value your people.

3. Celebrate small wins

You don’t have to plan a party every time salespeople land a meeting. But morale shoots up when small accomplishments are recognized, according to a Harvard Business School study.

Small wins have a disproportionate power over boosting moods and changing the perception of challenge. Recognize small wins – such as moving a prospect one step further down the pipeline – with written or verbal praise. Save big celebrations for more significant group wins.

4. Educate

Most salespeople are motivated by the chance to learn more about their industry, customers, products or services and other subjects that will help them do better at work and in life.

Encourage them to learn more by building time and expectations into their schedules to attend virtual and offsite educational events (not just events where they’d sell). Steer them to relevant webinars and podcasts. Give them books.

5. Offer financial incentives

Monetary incentives could be the way to go if you want a simple way to boost sales team motivation. These could include spot bonuses, contests, or higher commissions. You could even adjust compensation plans completely for top performers. Rewards are a great way to power your team through periods of low motivation.

Offering a financial incentive is a great way to impact your team immediately — but don’t fall into the trap of thinking it’s all they care about. We'd be lying if we said money doesn't still matter, but it isn't all that matters. People have walked away from tremendous compensation packages because they didn’t feel appreciated or valued in the ways that matter to them.

6. Say thank you often

It is easy to put your head down and focus on your workload, but try your best to say “thank you” — at least weekly. People need to know that their efforts are recognized and appreciated. Of course, you can never say “thank you” too often. If you can, be specific about why they make a difference.

7. Make goals clear and achievable.

As important as it is to ensure team members know that their work contributes to team goals, they must also know exactly what's expected of them--both near and long term. At the same time, good leaders know to set goals--both individual and team--that are achievable. Suicide missions not only aren't successful, but they also destroy team morale.