How to Improve your Salespeople’s Motivation at Work
Guest Post by Natalia Tobajas
Sales teams are usually in the spotlight when it comes to growing a business: make more calls, sell more, upgrade clients, get more leads.
It can get overwhelming to have a full agenda every day and, let’s face it, it can also be demotivating. It’s easy to get lost in the chaos when all eyes are on you to reach new results. And certainly, that’s not what a manager wants for its employees.
What can you do then to improve your salespeople’s motivation at work? It’s easier than you think if you have the correct tools — and yes, attitude also makes a difference.
Here are three tips to raise your sales team’s motivation during working hours, which will orient you in the right direction to promote job satisfaction and efficiency in your employees.
1. Automatize time-consuming tasks
Here comes the need for the right tools. As in any other department, your sales team deals with daily monotonous and time-consuming tasks that take time away from actual selling.
Thankfully, technology is on our side! There are several tools available to make both your personal life and professional work easier. For instance, Slack or Asana can improve your internal communication by making project management much more straightforward for everyone.
Another tool that makes a sales team more efficient is CalendarHero which finally allows you to skip the “when are you free?” back-and-forth through meeting scheduling automation. CalendarHero also integrates with your CRM system to quicken the CRM admin process and show your salespeople the information they need to know about clients prior to meetings.
Apart from the actual software, it’s also helpful to have good processes. Processes inform the particular ways of getting specific tasks done. It’s a useful idea to have these processes written down in some of your channels so that your employees can always go back to it in case of doubts.
2. Define SMART KPIs
Another useful tip to increase your employees’ focus is to clearly define objectives. More specifically, SMART objectives. For this, an ideal goal should be:
Specific: the more accurately you can define it, the easier it is for your salespeople to know exactly what to aim for. Avoid having them guessing the goal, or trying to make sense out of the wording. For instance, it’s more understandable to say “Contact 30 leads” than “Increase communication with potential customers”, right?
Measurable: the target your team is aiming for should be easily measurable so that one can actually know when it’s reached. Although not all KPIs are measured with numbers (i.e. be featured in Forbes magazine), Sales departments usually work with numeric targets to measure, for instance, deals closed, meetings booked, or activities finished (i.e. Close 5 deals by May).
Achievable: goals often have an aspirational vibe with them. While this can be motivating, it can also be a double-edged sword if it turns out to be an unreachable target. Therefore, the ideal KPI is challenging enough to keep your team’s hard-work at full potential, but not enough to look so unrealistic that they ultimately give up on it. Always take into consideration your resources and capabilities to determine the next KPIs.
Relevant: It might go without saying, but there should be a purpose behind every KPI. And it has to be relevant to an extent for the department or the business. For example, the KPI “reach out to 30 leads” is related to the OKR “Reach 2500 new clients by the end of Q2”. If you want to know more about OKRs for your business, follow the link.
Time-bound: last but not least, to make it relevant and keep the team focused on reaching the KPI, it’s essential to include a timeframe or deadline for each of them. Each KPI can have a different date, because they all cover different targets and, therefore, need more or fewer resources to get it done. In any case, it’s important to include the timeframe in the phrasing of the objective itself, like in “reach out to 30 leads this week”. It will also make it much easier to determine whether it has been achieved or not.
This being said, you can always edit an objective as your team progresses to update it to the current context. This way, your team will unlock new challenges as they achieve others, which will keep them actively aiming for them.
Extra tip: include your employees in the process of setting KPIs and goals. This gives you, as a manager, a more realistic overview of your resources, and avoids setting unreachable targets. As an employee, being involved in the process is part of a transparent culture, where your opinion is also valid.
3. Gamify the routine
Finally, as important as it is to set targets is to take time to celebrate when they are reached. There are many ways you can celebrate your team. Be creative!
However, in case you need some inspiration, here you have some ideas:
Create rituals for your achievements. For example, 12 push-ups for all your Sales department whenever one of your salespeople books a demo. Or a collective high-five whenever a salesperson closes a deal. This way, you both celebrate a goal and promote a friendly culture among your employees. Plus, it’s a fun way of keeping your team active and energetic.
Send instant notifications to all your team. Don’t just leave the celebrations for your sales team - include all your departments! This can be a bit chaotic if you have a big team, so you can opt to make it more of a symbolic celebration by sending them a fun notification with the accomplishment. And of course, there are also appropriate tools for this. For instance, Plecto is a data visualization software that, apart from showing your team their KPIs in real-time, it also offers unique gamification features like instant notifications and achievement badges.
Make it part of your meetings. At some point, corporate meetings have turned into problem-solution conversations — there’s nothing wrong with that, except for the lack of space for recognition typically involved. It is a healthy habit to start meetings by pointing out the successes, individual or per department; the achievements, and best practices. This sets a positive mood among the attendees and sets the pace to talk about performance and improvements.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Natalia Tobajas is the Content Manager at Plecto, where she manages the social media channels and writes about productivity, employer branding, and motivation at work.