Here’s the bottom line, the more motivated your sales team the more deals they will close. That being said, if you want to keep your cash flow in the green you need to build and maintain a motivated sales organization. High sales rep turnovers, resentment towards other sales reps, bad attitudes towards management, and poor camaraderie are all signs of a failing sales team. If you’re seeing any of those signs, use these three ways to motivate your sales team and close more deals.
Foster Healthy Competition
In any sales organization competition is natural. Since sales is mostly performance based, reps will often compare their performance to their colleagues. A great way to stir up some healthy competition is to introduce various contests for your salesforce. Keep the stakes high, but not so high that the team will resent whomever wins. Here are a few great contest ideas to get the juices flowing:
- Raffle Prizes: Set weekly or monthly sales targets and raffle off prizes to every sales rep who meets the target. This doesn’t restrict the prize to a single winner, that way every rep is working towards a personal goal.
- Executive Privileges: Whether its an executive parking spot or bathroom stall, you can offer access to these amenities as a prize.
- Customer Surveys: The customer always comes first, well kind of. Let your sales teams know you’ll be interviewing customers on a monthly basis. Sales teams with the highest customer satisfaction will win a team reward.
We’re all human in the end of the day, so it’s difficult to completely remove all negative sentiments from competition. Use these contests and tips to keep negative feelings at bay when fostering competition in your sales organization.
Automate Commission Payouts
In the end of the day, cash is king. The main motivation behind any salesman is their commission. Automating commission payouts is a great way to motivate your team, not to mention saves time and money in the long run. Instead of writing commission checks, look for a payments platform that offers automated payouts in the form of an eCheck. Whether its a one-time payout or a recurring payment, utilizing an online payments solution will streamline your payments process and save tons of accounting work. In addition, your sales team can be confident that any deal closed will result in an automated payout. The quicker the cash comes in, the quicker they’ll be out to close more deals.
Recruit Strategically
For fast growing companies, it’s a very common practice to hire lots of salespeople and churn out the bad eggs. A huge downside to this is that it kills your overall sales culture. It’s very hard to motivate your sales team when you give the impression that you’re willing to replace them at anytime. That’s not to say you shouldn’t look to find top talent but it’s definitely important to hire your team strategically.
Build a persona of your ideal salesperson. Give them all the attributes and qualifications required to work at a high level in your sales organization. Be very specific and only hire the candidates that truly meet those requirements. Once hired, you absolutely need to spend time educating and training your team. Your job as a leader is to provide a dynamic learning environment for your teams. Host weekly training sessions during the work day or take your teams to keynote speeches and workshops. If you become a role model to your salesforce you’ll gain their loyalty. Your sales organization will be motivated to work hard crush their quotas if they have a respectable mentor watching over them.
Sales is very tough. While salespeople are usually some of the top earners in a company, they are also the most replaceable. Use these three tips to keep your sales team motivated and close more deals!
