Motivate Your Salespeople
To Reach New Heights
Without Increasing Their Pay

The life of a salesperson can be quite hectic. As a sales leader you know it’s your job to combat the demotivating effects your salespeople experience as that chaos takes a toll on them, right?

Even people who aren’t in sales needs to refill their motivational fuel tank from time to time just to get things done. It’s easy to become lazy. As we find a rhythm in our work and the days start to blur together, but the rigors of working in sales can deplete motivation faster that anything else. 

How do you keep your sales team motivated?  

How do you keep them performing at a their very best?

These are very common questions. A common answer to these questions is that a good commission structure is all the motivation a sales professional needs. 

Of course, that simply isn’t the case. Top producing sales professionals lose interest and start slacking in their day-to-day activities all the time. This leads to sales slumps and turnover – either because it get’s the salesperson fired or because they know their close to being fired and quite to save face.

It’s really an issue of keeping the job from becoming stale.

You could play with the commission structure, but you’ve probably experience management try to do that to you and know decreasing commission percentages or decreasing territory size to inject urgency in a sales professional only creates resentment. And the only kind of urgency that is inspired by resentment is a hustle to find a new job, not the kind that produces more sales.

But how else can you motivate salespeople than with commissions and bonuses?

Well, that’s exactly what this article is all about.

 

Sources of Motivation are Subjective

My colleague, George Eliot, says that each person on your sales team – as an individual – has different motivators. For this reason there is no standard solution that will have the exact same motivating effect on every member of your sales team.

BUT – They probably don’t want a bunch of merchandise with the company logo on it.

I myself worked in a production factory where they would sometimes give us company merchandise. From time to time we’d received T-shirts or jumpers with the company name on them. Everybody in the factory hated the idea of wearing them. They’d all end up going straight in the bin.

Having said all this, I think it’s pretty clear how far a basic understanding of what your team appreciates goes.  

The easiest way reach that understanding is to simply ask your employees face-to-face, but you can also set up a survey or ask during team meetings. A combination of all three will probably give you the best insight though.

The idea is to make it personal. Simply showing your employees you’re willing to go out of your way to understand what motivates them and what kind of things they really appreciate might be enough to get team morale trending in the right direction. Suffice it to say that simply inquiring wont sustain that trend, but it’s a start. 

I myself would love it if my manager rewarded a job-well done with tickets to a Manchester United match, but the question is that if I was on your sales team would you care enough to ask what team I support?

 

Gamify Your Sales Team’s Activity

Competition in the workplace can bring some extraordinary rewards to your business. Especially when it comes to your sales team, generally salespeople have a competitive side. They either love to win or hate to lose. 

So why not leverage this competitiveness to the benefit of everyone involved, right?

In an article for LeadFuze.com  Emily Murray writes that having contests can reward creativity, bring some fun into the office, and nourish our humanly need for recognition. 

 

Recognition Goes a Long Way

We all respond to recognition when we’ve done something well, and as a leader you can do no wrong by recognizing individual salespeople or the whole sales team when they’ve done some really great work.

You know there are a lot of small steps and nuances to putting up impressive sales numbers, but even so, execution of best-practices doesn’t always produce the desired outcome in the short-term.

Now, you can’t go around handing out bonuses and incentive pay for hitting output benchmarks when those reps aren’t actually producing revenue. That would create an unhealthy dynamic for your team.

You can however, reinforce and encourage such activity to continue with non-monetary incentives and rewards. A simple act of recognition goes a long way in cases like this. It could come in the form of a certificate, medal, or a small trophy.

You can try to gain an idea of what is perceived to be a symbol of success in your company and then use them as motivators for your sales team.

Of course, the symbol itself isn’t what hold the power to motivate. It’s the recognition from you, as the leader, of a job well done that reinforces behavior and creates a healthy sense on competition among your sales team. Things like certificates, trophies, or medals are just the mechanism that makes your recognition tangible and harder to forget.

 

The Secret to Gamification as Sales Motivation

While a fun working environment can be a great motivator on its own. The true magic to creating contests and completions related to sales activity is that is can level the playing field between your newest and most veteran team members. 

The problem with simply tacking additional rewards to high sales numbers for the month, the quarter, or the year is that the people with the healthiest pipelines – likely your most senior sales staff – are at a significant advantage before the contest even begins. When this is the case newer sales reps know their odds of winning and are less motivated to change their activity.

Similarly, the reps with the most healthy pipeline – with revenue that is near secured before the contest start – know they’re a shoe-in and aren’t going to work any harder or smarter than they would have before.

Where as, if you incentivize prospecting activity, pipeline advancement, or other sales activities that lead to sales rather than the sales themselves you have a really oppotunity to increase performance at every level of your team.

Again, this is way of spicing up what would otherwise be the same old work activity, day-in and day-out. If done properly is also allows you to reinforce best practices without having to harp on or nag individual salespeople.

Not only do internal sales competitions give opportunities to give recognition, but also to dramatize that recognition with a suspenseful build up to that moment when a winner is crowned.

As human beings we’re all drawn to drama and suspense. If you want your sales team to be more engaged and excited about work, the drama of competition is a great way to do it!

It’s not so much the value of the prize to be won that is so powerful as a motivator, it’s the recognition from you as their leader on a job well-done that’s powerful. Of course, an enticing prize to the winner of a sales contest doesn’t hurt.

Depending on the scale of you contest things like an extra hour of lunch time during the week, gift cards, or extra paid time off, can make the contest that much more exciting for your team to participate in. 

 

Training Through Gamification

Another great way to get the competitive side to come out of your salespeople is to split your sales force into teams that compete against one another.

By creating competitive teams that mix more experienced sales professionals with their less experienced ones, the best practices of your more veteran staff are likely to rub off on your newer team members. Your veterans are also more likely to take the time to mentor your newer staff, because they have a vested interest in that person’s job improvement in the near future.

 

Individual Competition

Again it’s important to organize your sales contests in such a way that they wont be won by the “stars” of your sales team every time. You want to give everybody a fair chance.

In the interest of leveling the playing field between members of your team and giving everyone the feeling that they truly have a chance to benefit from competing, you might also consider having individuals pair off to compete one-on-one.

Thomas Steenburgh and Michael Ahearne suggest yet another option in an article for the Harvard Business Review. Their recommendation is to handicap for contestants prior competing. This makes the contest inclusive yet competitive. Your sales team will be able to compete based on their level of individual improvement rather exact revenue production.

 

Spontaneous Gift Giving

It’s great to receive those birthday cards and Christmas cards, right?  

It’s even better when somebody makes the effort to send you a surprise card or gift out of the blue. The gifts and rewards you give don’t have to solely based around winning a competition or contest.

Sometimes giving your employee a gift that seems almost randomly just to show that you appreciate the work they do can speak a million times more than an expected reward for reaching a predetermined milestone or winning some kind of sales team competition.

As a sales leader it’s your job to be building your salespeople up, making them feel confident and appreciated. When you do that they become loyal and driven to see the organization – something that is bigger than themselves – succeed as a whole.

That type of loyalty can only be forged from strong relationships. These are kind of relationships Carly Trombley talks about in her article, Gifts They’ll Never Forget.

Put simply, the kinds of gifts and gestures that get someone’s attention are personalized and thoughtful. They don’t come in the form of branded swag. They do however, have the greatest impact when presented at the least expected times, according to gifting expert John Ruhlin.

 

Spontaneous, Yet Consistent Praise

According to Carly the most lucrative and powerful relationships take time to build and that they are built over the course of many interactions. She also says that the interactions don’t have to be huge but they have to be regular enough in frequency to be memorable.

I couldn’t agree more with Carly.

In my personal experience – being told that I’ve done a good job is great, but when it was only once in a blue moon I would wonder if my work was truly appreciated or if perhaps my work had slipped.

When I’ve received praise more regularly however, I had more confidence in the legitimacy of that praise and knew my manager really did appreciate me and the work I was doing.

It’s funny how a little thank-you can mean so much.

According to CallCentreHelper.com, a creating a sustained change in behavior and performance in your sales team requires consistent, frequent feedback, and praise throughout the day, everyday.

 

Motivate Your Salespeople
Without Paying Them More

So by now I hope you’ve learned some alternatives to motivating your sales team rather than relying too heavily on their commission structure alone to keep them engaged and productive.

Get to know the people on your sales team. Find out what motivates them and then reward them with such when they deserve it. When you do you’ll find you have a much happier, more motivated sales team, and a better work environment altogether.

Save yourself some money, get out there and interact with your salespeople!

 

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About The Author of This Article: Eric Reilly worked in a butcher shop for 2 years before he left to pursue becoming a qualified digital marketer. Now, he has a Professional Diploma in Digital Marketing and he is the Owner/Operator of an online website called Guitarmuso.com.

Eric is a Social Media Manager and hopes to travel as much of the world as possible with his girlfriend.

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