Suddenly, your sales reps don’t have energy, lack determination, and their discipline is missing to sell on a consistent basis. You’ve tried a lot of things, but nothing seems to work with your demotivated sales reps. It looks like you can’t find ways to maximize your sales reps’ time, focus and enthusiasm. You are not the only one struggling with that. Your team still has successful salespersons they are only missing one thing: motivation.
Motivation means wanting something so bad that your sales reps are willing to act and make it happen. To sell better, salespersons must put forth their best effort. Not all the effort should come from them, their directors and managers must do their best to. It’s something reciprocal, that’s the reason we have these recommendations for you. Turn demotivated sales reps into great performers and avoid the turnover.
We know you want your sales team to be the best that ever existed, excel and go huge. Stop for a while and think about goal setting. Not everything has to be about ambitious and intimidating goals; otherwise, you’ll end up with demotivated sales reps again. A good strategy for achieving what you want in terms of sales is to set a series of small goals that will ultimately sum up and create a big achievement. That way, your team will work harder filling this constant sense of success. It is like making a complicated dish recipe, you must go step by step and paying close attention to details.
Salespeople not only compete against each other, they compete against their past performance too, gamification and fun dynamics help them to beat their own top scores. You can get creative and think outside the box. Small prizes, leaderboards, tokens of achievement, sales rep of the month, and so on. Adding a fun twist to a sales team is a way to encourage friendly competition and enhance the work environment.
Maybe this is the main reason behind your demotivated sales reps. The foundation of motivation is trust. Your sales team will find it very difficult to get inspired and driven by their job without trust. The first step is not to try to hide things and be as direct as possible. The second step is to have a helping mindset always eager to solve problems and help each of your sales reps grow and improve. Finally, show appreciation. Your team members need to know that you are committed to them.
Demotivated sales reps and salespeople point fingers and try to pass the blame to others when something does not work well. Start bringing sales, marketing, customer support, and finance together, and remove barriers. You will truly start to see growth. With every department being involved, your sales reps will feel they are important to achieve overall company goals.
Salespeople tend to look at the money they are owning as a measure of how good they are doing, and a bad commission tracking or management could trigger a lot of demotivated sales reps. Commissions are such an important part of the motivation for strong sales production. With a proper commission plan and proper commission tracking, your salespeople will have the desire to go after more prospects and interesting sales deals. Companies are starting to use commission tracking software like Blitz to keep their sales reps motivated. Blitz allows you to have full visibility of your commission process and gives very little room for errors.
Forget about demotivated sales reps, let them know you care about them and make them see how important their work for the company success is. Spread the trust using Blitz and let them have full visibility of their performance and commission process. Decrease turnover and let the growth be constant and solid.
Inc.com
Leadership Thoughts
Harvard Business Review