How to Motivate Your Sales Team to Be Overachievers
As a sales manager or director, one of your primary goals is to motivate your employees to maximize their performance. By evaluating their progress and setting goals, you can determine what areas need improvement and create strategies for success accordingly. However, motivating your sales team to go above and beyond for your company’s success can be challenging.
Motivating your sales team involves understanding internal and external factors influencing their productivity. Take some time to learn what factors influence your team’s productivity, including salary, resource access, workload, and economic state. Once you’ve determined the factors, use the following strategies to motivate your sales team to become overachievers.
Set Personal & Team Goals
Setting clear goals helps the sales team understand the company’s expectations and perform their tasks accordingly. Being aware of personal goals fosters an environment of accountability and responsibility. Whereas team goals enhance collaboration, motivating the team to communicate effectively to reach their goals.
Have one-on-one conversations with each team member to help them realize that overachieving isn’t impossible. Ask them to note their progress and demonstrate the benefits of stretching their targets. Depending on the incentives you offer, this could include monetary compensation, paid days off, or a chance to be considered for a promotion. This can motivate your sales team to push harder to become overachievers.
You can also consider implementing the “Spiff” method into your program. Spiff stands for “Sales Performance Incentive Funds – a short-term, incentive-based initiative meant to motivate sales representatives. Embracing the Spiff concept requires you to give your sales professionals a specific task and timeframe in exchange for a reward. Most spiff incentives are financial but can also include prizes, vacations, and recognition. Spiffs allow employees to meet short-term sales needs and stay engaged.
Offer Attractive Incentives
If you expect your sales team to go above and beyond to help your company grow, it’s natural for them to expect more than base pay. When your sales team feels motivated to work towards a goal, they are likely to engage with their team members and follow strategies for success. Introducing an employee incentive program will allow you to improve productivity, lower production costs, and reduce employee retention.
A meta-analytic review of studies focusing on using incentives to motivate performance found a 22 percent gain in performance through incentive programs in all work settings. These results demonstrate the value of offering incentives to your sales team to improve motivation. However, the influence of the incentive can vary among different companies. You can speak to your team to determine which incentives are valuable or try out different methods to observe which offers the best results.
Frequently Monitor Progress
If your sales team cannot look back and trace their achievements, they may be unaware of how they are performing. Frequently monitoring progress and sharing them with your sales team enables them to visualize their achievements, which can be a motivating factor, pushing them to work harder.
Monitoring progress also allows sales managers to modify sales strategies based on the results and helps them understand how to reallocate resources or tools to help the team perform better. In some cases, you may notice that the team’s progress is slow due to a heavy workload. The excessive workload can demotivate employees and lead to unmet goals. Timely check-ins will enable you to determine if you need to add new members to the team to distribute the work evenly.
When looking for new sales professionals to add to the team, you want to ensure that you choose qualified candidates. You can streamline the process by looking for New York City sales recruiters that match employers with top sales talent. A recruitment agency with extensive experience can simplify the hiring process by finding the ideal candidate to add to your team, saving you the time and hassle of sifting through numerous applications.
Motivating your sales team to be overachievers can significantly improve your company’s image, boost profits, and reduce costs. Implement the strategies above to push your sales team to perform their best, and don’t forget to celebrate their wins!
Mahesh Kumar is a dynamic marketing consultant and tech enthusiast with a passion for driving business growth through his innovative strategies and cutting-edge technology. With 6 years of experience in the industry, he has helped numerous businesses leverage the power of digital marketing to reach their target audience, build brand awareness, and increase sales.
