Motivating Sales Reps
When it comes to motivating your sales reps, we need to take a step back and look at the personalities that encompass your sales team.
Most sales reps are hunters, not gatherers. Let’s see why conversational intelligence tools can make the hunt (aka finding prospects) easier.
At the end of the day, money and time will always be the top motivations for any employee. But there are other ways to help keep the motivation high, when a raise, bonus, or additional vacation time isn’t an option.
We’ll dive into those and show you tactics that managers, like yourself, can implement with your team right away.
But first, stick with the basics when motivating.
Before we get into motivation it’s important to remember that you can’t motivate people who don’t want to be there. Shawn Buxton said it best, check out our podcast titled ‘ Never Motivate ‘ with him on why he believes “never motivate”.
If your sales rep isn’t producing, extra “motivation” might not be what is needed. Stick with the basics. If the results aren’t there, find critical activities you can focus on to get the sales rep back in the groove. Help take the stress away by influencing other aspects that can lead to improved results. Which in turn will result in more money.
Be transparent and honest when it comes to their results instead of trying to fake “motivation”.
Now that we got that out of the way, here are a few tactics that you can implement to help your team keep kicking ass.
Tactic #1: Gamification
The thrill of the chase and competitiveness are essential pieces when it comes to sales. You will find very few sales reps who don’t like that. That’s the hunter part of their personality.
A Salesforce survey found that 71% of companies reported sales performance gains of 11-50% from adding gamification for their sales teams.
Think about that. Not only will your reps get competitive, but they will in turn make more money for the company and more money for themselves.
BUT it’s important to remember that you can’t gamify everything. If you make every month a competition for the reps to not only hit quota but also add in other pieces – it becomes too much.
They will lose the thrill of the chase of that internal competition. Motivating your sales reps will come in waves.
Tactic #2: Tool Up With Conversational Intelligence Tools
Software is the future. There is no denying that. If you’re not empowering your team with sales coaching tools, then you’re already being left behind.
There is a fine line between too many tools and adding software to your tech stack that will make a difference. Here is how we see it. Conversational intelligence tools are great, but you really need real-time conversational intelligence. If it’s not real-time, then you’ll keep losing opportunities because you’re being reactive.
Real-time conversational intelligence tools bring autonomy to your team. Motivating your sales reps also in turn means building trust and giving them the tools they need so you’re not looking over their shoulder every day.
Sales coaching is hard enough when it’s only one of your many job responsibilities, so why not tool up and allow software to handle some of those tasks?
Tactic #3: Knowledge is Power
The best sales reps are not only experts on their product, but they are also knowledgeable about the industry, and competitors, and have an overall interest in learning. This helps give them more opportunities to relate to their prospects.
Give your team more knowledge by allowing them to take personal development courses, sales coaching webinars, and even attend conferences.
This will give them outside motivation to further their career, and not be solely focused on tasks. It gets them thinking about the bigger picture. Knowledge is a motivation in itself.
Tactic #4: Show me the money
There is no denying it. Motivating your sales reps starts with money. While the goal of this post was to focus on other ways to motivate them besides money, we had to add this.
Time and money.
If you want more productivity and improved results, time and money will give any person the motivation they need to succeed.
Now it’s important to remember that only giving these two things is not the answer. Providing a community and a place where employees feel welcomed will tie into that motivation. It’s a balance.
But you can’t motivate your sales team forever without time or money either.
Why You Should Take A Second Look At Real-Time
There are endless conversational intelligence tools on the market, but if you do not have a REAL-TIME tool in your tech stack – it’s time to reassess.
Here is why…
Real-time tools and sales coaching allow you to scale yourself. Think of what could be done instead of listening to call recordings. Even more so, how many more opportunities could your team have moved through the pipeline if you were there on every call?
Just because something has been done the same way for years doesn’t mean that has to be the way it is. Real-Time Call Coaching software is making waves in SaaS, insurance, and contact centers because of the immediate impact it makes.
We’ll show you how it works and if we don’t think Abstrakt is a good fit for your team, we’ll let you know right away as we don’t like wasting people’s time.
Resources:
1: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/publications/time-vs-money-effect