Sales can be rewarding, exciting, and engaging. However, they can also be demoralizing, challenging, and downright draining. Your sales team is the fuel that keeps the engine running. Today, we’re going to look at ten effective ways you can keep your sales team motivated in order to achieve results.

Where Does Sales Motivation Come from?

Two things are very clear when it comes to sales: it’s not easy, and there is no obvious solution to making it easier.

As rewarding as sales can be, it’s also extremely challenging. Motivating sales teams has been a challenge to business leaders and sales managers for countless years.

Sales motivation can come from a lot of different places. Some people suggest that the ability of a salesperson to maintain their motivation levels is purely genetic, based on the personality they were born with. 

Others say that the best way to improve motivation with your sales team is by compensating them according to their results. This structure of “sell more, earn more” has been standard practice across the globe. In general, incentivized pay tends to work better with motivating sales teams compared to a straight salary.

Sales motivation can also be traced back to the quality of a sales manager. When a manager pays better attention to the needs of their sales team and implements practices like goal setting, coaching, regular evaluations and knowledge sharing, it can have a massively positive effect on the internal motivation of your sales team.

Sales systems also help with keeping motivation levels high with your sales team. The right system will give your sales team a better direction or course of action. This can directly affect motivation levels since you’ll be able to decrease the ratio of failures to successes, keeping motivation levels higher. When you can structure the job of your salespeople towards higher probability, you’ll be able to allow your sales team to function at much higher potential.

At the end of the day, sales motivation comes from a wide variety of factors. When each of these factors work in tandem, the overall levels of motivation within your sales team will increase and sustain itself for longer periods of time.

How to Motivate Your Sales Team to Achieve Next-Level Results

If your teams have been working in a rough patch and they’re hitting more walls than they normally do, it’s easy for motivation levels to dwindle and drop rapidly. This is where having the ability to motivate your team and get them out of a rut and firing on all cylinders comes in handy.

Let’s look at ten effective tips that you can implement immediately in order to get your sales team back in business and working at peak performance.

Create Alignment Between Individuals, Team and Organization

When a sales team isn’t entirely aligned at both the individual and organizational level, it’s easy for members to lose motivation, get discouraged and sometimes even feel burnt out. This is comparable to having a team of rowers that are all rowing at different paces.

You need alignment between your individual sales team members and between members of your team and organization as a whole. When everyone is working with the same strategy towards the same goal, great things can happen. 

A great way to improve alignment is to improve communication within your organization. Keep your communication clear and understandable when it comes to your sales goals, your strategies and your expectations. Allow for open channels where salespeople can ask questions and get clarity without feeling left out. 

When communication is clear and understandable, it makes the entire sales process a lot smoother. Reps communicate with managers easier, managers communicate with superiors better, and the entire process works better together.

Offer Coaching to Improve Performance

As we mentioned earlier, knowledge sharing and coaching are very important factors when it comes to sustaining higher motivation levels within your sales team. Sometimes sales reps can feel like they’re hitting a brick wall day in and day out. A little guidance or coaching can help them see each situation differently and can give them the tools to navigate each sale better in order to reach higher rates of closing.

While your high-performing salespeople generally don’t need coaching, offering mentoring and coaching sessions to lower-performing members of your team is a great way to improve the overall effectiveness of your sales team by lifting the bottom line.

Mentoring and coaching sessions can help reps self-diagnose deficiencies, enabling them to take greater ownership of their performance and improve their outcomes.

Help Your Sales Team Solve Their Issues

As we mentioned in the beginning, sales are hard, and there’s no obvious way to make them easier. 

That said, there are things you can do to look into and assess the individual issues of your sales team in order to efficiently solve them and get your reps working better. Some issues sales teams regularly encounter include a lack of qualified leads, low response rates, spending too much time on administrative tasks and not maintaining customer relations after a sale has been completed.

While each one of these issues requires its own degree of effort to solve, they are by no means impossible. Administrative tasks can be shortened by using management software. Qualified leads can be found with the right CRM tools. And low response rates can be fixed by improved sales service and empathy.

While each of these will take time to address and fix, it can be done. And once your get the majority of major hindering issues out of the way, you’ll notice more motivation within your sales team and improved results in your sales figures.

Offer Praise Publicly

There are few things people like more than to be appreciated. And when it comes to appreciation and gratitude, it doesn’t get much better than when it’s done publicly.

The need for recognition and praise is seemingly ingrained into our DNA. Shockingly, but not surprisingly, employees who say they aren’t being appreciated at work are around three times more likely to quit than employees who feel they are well-appreciated.

Appreciation makes us feel like we belong. It gives a deeper sense of meaning and purpose to the work we do. 

Some ways you can give motivational praise include:

Looking into the individual work of your sales team to find out what they are doing better or what problems they’re solving on their own (this can take time, but it’s more than worth it). 

Encouraging peer-to-peer praise. 

Praising changes that you see in your sales team (attention to detail, better post-sale relationship management, etc.). 

Tying their efforts to the greater purpose of the company.

Offer Appropriate Rewards, Monetary or Otherwise

Salespeople are people. So if people like being rewarded for their efforts, that means salespeople like being rewarded for their efforts. Rewards can be tied in with praise. 

Compensation is different from rewards. Compensation might be made in the form of commission from a sale; rewards are comparable to gifts from the company to the salesperson for a job well done. 

Rewarding your salespeople can be done in many ways. From promotions to financial rewards, to travel vouchers and tickets to sporting events. The secret to giving a good reward is to look at what the individual would appreciate. This makes the reward a lot more special, and it shows your sales team that you care about them and their lives outside of work.

Don’t Bog Down the Sales Team with Admin Work

We briefly touched on this in point number 3: When a sales team has to spend a lot of time on admin work, it takes away a lot of time they could be spending on making more sales. 

Another problem with giving your sales team too much admin work is that it ruins their day-to-day momentum. There’s nothing worse than having to file paperwork and trudge through four layers of admin work after making a big sale.

Too much administration can be demoralizing for your sales team, but it’s also a fixable issue. Most modern CRM tools can help with a lot of the heavy admin lifting. This takes the admin work off your sales team’s plate, giving them more time for sales and keeping their motivation levels high.

Ensure Each Member of Your Sales Team Has Enough Prospects

Another point we briefly touched on earlier in the blog was that a sales team’s motivation can suffer when they don’t have enough warm leads to follow. 

When your sales team is spending their time speaking to unqualified leads, it can feel incredibly frustrating and demoralizing. On the flip side, when they have enough qualified leads to speak to, it makes their rate of success a lot higher, not to mention it greatly helps with motivation levels.

There are more and more ways to find qualified leads, from software to in-house methods. Creating high-quality content on online platforms can significantly increase the number of qualified leads. 

Content is becoming more and more recognized as a powerful tool for generating leads. Focusing on high-quality content means that you will have more people reaching out to you for your products or services. This will keep your sales pipeline full and your sales team happy and motivated.

Set Realistic Targets

Nothing can be quite as overwhelming as when a team has unrealistic goals and expectations set on them. While motivating your sales team to reach their goals with monetary compensation might seem intuitive, if the goals are simply unrealistic, the amount of compensation has a minimal impact on the rate of success.

When teams are overloaded with unreasonable deadlines or amounts of work, it tends to lead to burnout more than anything else. The last thing you want is people quitting on the job.

This is usually a fault of sales team management, as well as upper management. While your sales team should be expected to perform, overloading them will usually have the opposite effect. 

Work with your managers to see how you can set realistic targets and goals that your sales team can work towards. These goals don’t necessarily have to be achievable, as long as they can seem achievable. You’ll be surprised at how much people can accomplish when they work together to reach a target.

Equip Your Sales Team with the Right Tools

Having the right tools can make all the difference when it comes to the effectiveness of your sales team and their overall sales figures.

Some highly effective sales tools your team can use to improve their weekly, monthly and yearly results are listed below:

Wingmate:
Lead capturing and CRM functionality all under one simple app.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator:
Reach out to your ideal prospects directly and build lasting relationships.

Whatfix:
Guide, train, and support sales teams no matter what tech stack they’re using.

Prelay:
Improve your customer journey from start to finish.

Outreach:
Simplify, automate and manage your outreach.

Encourage Autonomy

Our last tip for today is a combination of all the nine earlier tips wrapped into one. 

Autonomy allows your sales team to do what they do best without being micromanaged or feeling like there’s someone looking over their shoulders.

Autonomy allows your sales team to perform at their best level. It also streamlines the entire sales process from start to finish. By telling your team what needs to be done and allowing them to figure and work out how, you allow them to find ways that work best for them. This also shows your team that you trust them to get it done, which can also lead to better motivation levels within your team.

Allowing for broader thinking is another way you can help foster autonomy within your team. Things like working hours and working from home options, benefits and leave allowance all tell employees that you trust them to get their work done.

People love working for companies and businesses that trust their ability and leave them to get the work done without them having to justify or over-explain themselves.

Build autonomy within your sales team, and you will see their motivation levels and sales figures soar.