You will never achieve your numbers if your people are not motivated

Here is the first in a series of items on how we drive towards closing the quarter. Rather than going straight into closing techniques, we thought it would be useful to start with the essential precondition - the motivation of your people.


Recently, when assessing a sales team, I was asked by their sales manager, "How can I get my people more motivated? As you have seen, they have the talent but do not seem to be out with customers prospecting, qualifying and closing as much as they ought."

Sell them the reason to be motivated - find the trigger
Motivation is emotionally based, linked to an attitude of mind that drives a desire to do or achieve something. Importantly, it is personal to the individual. You can't "make someone more motivated". What you can do however as a Sales Manager, is to create an atmosphere and culture which lends itself to your team having a desire to achieve. It is more of a 'pull' than a 'push'

Motivation is different for all of us; true motivation comes from within – it can’t be imposed. To sustain motivation, you can help team members tap into their own motivational triggers, encourage them to talk frequently about previous times in their career/life when they were highly motivated. Do they have a specific personal target; an exotic holiday, a new car, move house. Get them to visualise what they need to do to achieve that target, now link that to what you need them to do. "One of our colleagues wanted a flat abroad, he broke down what he would need in terms of additional monthly earning and kept a "holiday flat fund" which was always on his desk. Each month we discussed with him the state of the fund and he told us what he needed to sell to achieve his goal"

Help, through coaching, your team members to believe that they can be successful. Limiting beliefs can hold back even the most confident people from achieving success. Limiting beliefs are like having weeds growing in your garden; if you do not pull them out, they will take over your garden.

Provide effective and evidence based feedback on a regular basis to increase an individual’s self-confidence and motivation to taking the next steps to achieving success.

At 1:1 meetings and developmental coaching sessions get your team to set themselves goals (do not impose goals upon them). Get them to come up with their own ways of improving.

A good tip is to ask your team member, "on a scale of 1 to 10 how do you feel about your performance?" Assuming they score it at less than 10 then ask them what they would do to make it a 10.

Motivation comes from within but as Sales Managers we can help our team members to find it within themselves



Closing the quarter exercise

1. Get every member of your team to identify a personal goal, it must be tangible and progress towards success must be measurable.
   
   
2. Each team member should publicise what they are trying to achieve and at each sales meeting get them to tell everyone how they are doing against that target.
   
   
3. By sharing targets you get peer pressure, not around who is selling the most, but on who is achieving their personal targets - that will motivate people. They picked the target themselves and they cannot say it was imposed.

Try it and tell us how it works

Want to know more? Visit our website www.sales-accredit.com or contact me directly fred.nelson@sales-accredit.com

Next week we will look at how you can get your team to create personal business plans to achieve the quarter.