Motivation Activities to Drive Sales Team Excellence

Let’s break this definition down into activities that have been identified by the assessment that as a sales leader, you can utilize to help motivate your people. If you want to be an effective sales leader with a strong motivating competency, you will:

• Know What Motivates Salespeople - By learning what uniquely motivates your salespeople, you will likely find that they will work harder and more effectively because their actions will support their goals. 

• Give Recognition - By more regularly praising your salespeople when they are positively performing, you can raise their self-image and may find that they are more effective.

• Run Effective Sales Meetings - By making a conscious effort to include motivation in your sales meetings, you can help ensure the motivation of your salespeople does not wane and protect against negative sentiment.

• Beliefs Support Motivation - Some of your beliefs related to sales management may be misaligned with the role and importance of motivating your sales team. In other words, to be effective, you must believe it is important!

• Have a Good Self-Image - Your strong self-image helps you be brave while selling, and it also helps you motivate your salespeople. With both intrinsic and extrinsic motivational factors in play, it is often difficult to understand but you must have the courage to get personal and build relationships with your salespeople. 

• Develop Strong Relationships - By addressing areas for growth in the Relationship Building Competency, you will be able to build stronger bonds with your salespeople that will provide insights into how you can motivate them. More on the Relationship Building Competency in our next post in this series.

• Take Responsibility - Your tendency to consistently take responsibility helps motivate your salespeople, as they know that you will not blame them for negative sales outcomes.

• Won’t Accept Mediocrity - You have high expectations for your salespeople and don't except mediocre performance, even if that makes your salespeople unhappy with you.

• Have Goals and a Plan - By improving your personal goals management system, you can also motivate your salespeople to be more goal oriented.

Take a moment to review and rate yourself on these 9 competencies of a successful motivational sales leader. It has been stated that motivation is an inside-out job meaning that as a sales leader, you must understand what motivates your people internally in order to help drive the external results – more clients, more sales, larger average accounts, more network, etc. You cannot create motivation in your people, but you can become better at understanding how they are motivated to tap into what it takes to drive their individual inspiration. One by one, taking the time to more fully understand these motivational factors for each salesperson on your team, will help you get closer to achieving sales team excellence.

Drawing from this recent article in Inc., How to Revitalize Your Industry Without Needing to Disrupt It, “Non-disruptive transformation is a journey back to the roots, where the customer is not merely a transaction but the focal point of every endeavor. As industries evolve, this approach offers a blueprint for sustainable growth, ensuring that innovation serves the fundamental purpose of meeting customer needs and enhancing their experience.”

While all financial institutions are heavily investing in the technology necessary to stay competitive and viable in today’s virtual world, the community bank must not lose site of it's original mission to personally serve that client. At the other end of those tech systems and data are the frontline people in your bank and answering your customer service lines. Are they as skilled as they can be to have engaging conversations? Are they skilled enough to listen to learn, probe for deeper understanding, not pitch solutions too soon and become financial guides for their clients and prospects? That is the role of the new community bank. To leverage all of the information at their fingertips, provide seamless knowledge and advice in a holistic and personal manner for their local families and businesses.

To do this in a non-disruptive way, banks can focus on developing their people, their most important asset. As you hire and bring new people in the door, make certain that they have the skills to ask those courageous questions and delve deeper. It may require an investment to upgrade the skill levels of those who work in the local branch and operate in a business development role, developing them to a great level of advisory service.

Drawing from the Inc. article again; “In the ever-evolving landscape of industries, non-disruptive transformation emerges as a strategic and sustainable approach to innovation. Businesses can carve out a niche while maintaining continuity and stability by focusing on fundamental tasks, breaking the status quo, and returning to the industry's original concept.”

Success in the future for community banks lies in aligning and differentiating with the core values that have defined the industry's essence for centuries.

There are assessments in the marketplace to help people identify if they have what it takes. We use Objective Management Group’s (OMG) Sales Manager Evaluation. Three key findings are identified and scored:

1. The Will to be Successful specifically in the role of manager or sales leader
2. The Sales Manager DNA
3. The Sales Manager Competencies

In this series, we will break down several of these 3 findings to help sales managers zero in on what might be preventing you from achieving sales team excellence.

The Impact of Supportive Beliefs

OMG's research has found that high self-awareness is especially important for sales managers. Self-awareness helps you better understand the belief systems that you are consciously or unconsciously bringing into interactions with your salespeople or any customers you directly interface with. It also helps you understand how you might interpret a salesperson or client's response to you. Below we've listed 7 Self-Limiting Beliefs that could be preventing you from achieving sales team success, along with the corresponding Supportive Beliefs that you can develop with training and coaching.

Self-Limiting Belief: I don't need to manage my salespeople's daily activity
Supportive Belief: It is my job to manage my salespeople's daily activity

Self-Limiting Belief: I don't need to know what motivates my salespeople
Supportive Belief:  It is important to understand my salespeople's personal goals and financial needs

Self-Limiting Belief: I don't need to upgrade the sales force
Supportive Belief: It is important to regularly recruit new salespeople

Self-Limiting Belief: Raising my people's self-esteem is not a high priority
Supportive Belief: I must encourage my salespeople to get the most from them

Self-Limiting Belief: Prospects that need time to think before making a decision will eventually buy from us
Supportive Belief: Prospects that need time to think before making a decision will not end up doing business with us

Self-Limiting Belief: My salespeople need to make presentations
Supportive Belief: My salespeople should make presentations to fully qualified prospects and only when necessary

Self-Limiting Belief: I don't need a strong relationship with my prospects in order to sell them
Supportive Belief: I am able to quickly develop strong rapport with prospects

As you review and reflect on these 7 beliefs, how do you score on each?  What can you and will you do differently to change your coaching behavior and skill levels?  In our world today with the many digital and AI-programmed interactions, we have entered into a new reality when it comes to achieving sales team success. In order to stay ahead of the competition, companies need sales managers or coaches with supportive belief systems who can track each individual’s sales activities, coach, and hold them accountable to behaviors that will sustain and grow revenue.

Qualities of a Motivational Sales Leader

Certainly, understanding who you are hiring from the start is essential in having a team that is motivated to reach their sales goals. As a part of the hiring process, leaders must consistently use an assessment, preferably a sales-specific assessment, to identify if candidates are motivated, can sell, and will sell. We all understand that motivation is primarily an internal quality driven by personal factors of having goals, the desire to achieve, compete, and excel. However, there are also certain qualities that leaders must have to uncover and ignite the flame of those they motivate.

Drawing from Objective Management Group’s sales manager assessment, our partner and the pioneer of the sales assessment industry, we know that these are the characteristics of leaders who are effective motivators:

• Know what motivates people
• Have a strong self image
• Give recognition
• Do not accept mediocrity

Sales Leaders Must Know What Motivates Their People

When we first started evaluating sales teams 25 years ago – the findings told us that people were externally motivated. Motivation was money and the things money can provide. The current findings tell us that sales teams are highly motivated to succeed, but the source of motivation is internal rather than external. They are more motivated by a job well done, taking care of, and being a guide for their clients. They want to be recognized for success and they are motivated by achieving their own personal standards for success and achievement. As a sales leader, it is your job to find out what motivates your people and then you can have the appropriate discussions to keep them on track.

Sales Leaders Must Have a Strong Self Image

Much like salespeople, leaders must be internally motivated to develop and help others. This is often a problem when a leader is promoted from a sales position due to their success at driving sales and revenue into a sales leadership role in which the focus is achieving success through others. Some can make that transition and others do not. Leaders with a strong self image will spend time developing their own skills through the many resources available today from training and online as well as books and podcasts.

Another way to improve self-image and success as a leader motivating a sales team is to implement management practices that allow you to understand the activities and behaviors for potential coaching opportunities. A strong sales leader will hold regular sales huddles focused on the most critical activities that drive success, such as appointments and proposals.  They will have regular monthly sales meetings to help their team sharpen their saw, improve and learn from each other. Probably most importantly, sales leaders will implement a process to uncover personal and professional goals of their sales team so they can understand what motivates them. Implementing these activities helps sales leader become more effective in their role as a sales motivator and will improve their self-image and success.

Motivating Your Team with Regular Recognition (and Feedback to Improve)

Many, but not all salespeople thrive on winning, positive feedback, and recognition, so this is a given for effective sales leaders. Find opportunities to recognize the efforts, behaviors, and success of your team members, whether it is one-on-one or in a group setting. Leader boards, celebrating wins, and giving rewards are all motivating factors.

But what about the other end of the stick?  An effective sales leader must be focused on motivating a salesperson who is going off track, not doing the behaviors needed or agreed upon for reaching their sales goals. To motivate a sales team, leaders must have practices and processes in place to catch lagging behaviors quickly before they become a real problem. Coaching and motivating are very closely related. If a sales leader can help identify what is getting in the way of a salesperson attaining more appointments and can coach them to improvement, that can be very motivating for a salesperson.

Strong Sales Leaders Do Not Accept Mediocrity

Most leaders will tell you that they do not accept mediocrity however if you review their stack ranking, they have and keep low performers. Every company has a lowest performer. But what can a sales leader do to improve performance overall so that each year, that lowest performer is better than before?

We coach organizations and leaders to Set the Bar for Success by:

• Clearly establishing and communicating what it means to be successful in the organization.
• Have systems and processes in place to catch failure before failure happens rather than when it actually happens. Failure never happens all at once.
• Track the improvement of performance quintiles year over year. When you take the snapshot next year, the numbers for each quintile have to be better than the previous year.
• Establish a culture and commitment to set the bar higher for success and then hold people accountable to actually doing the behaviors required to be successful.

Motivating a sales team to success is no easy achievement. It takes consistent and persistent behaviors. Strong sales managers do not worry about being liked by their salespeople. They achieve success when their salespeople become more effective and successful.

• Don’t think of them as just a Lead. When someone fills out a form on your website that indicates they have an interest and have gone to the trouble of downloading a resource, so yes, that is a Lead. More importantly, they are a person that has an interest, possibly a problem or an opportunity and is looking for information that you and your company may have. It is time to do some initial research and find out what company they are with, where they are located, what they might need help with and then, a Lead becomes much more then just a prospect. Lead relationship management involves having a sincere curiosity about the lead, what they might be interested and looking for and a desire to help.
• Respond Quickly. We have helped salespeople for 30 years now and if there is one best practice that has stayed consistent, it has been how swiftly your should respond. When a Lead fills out a form and assuming they are a person who looks like your type of best prospect is, reach out immediately. If you do not, they will continue their search, find other solutions and be sidetracked by other issues that come across their desk. Now is the best time to call a Lead, while they are looking and while it is top of mind. Contact within the first 24 hours is the best approach for lead relationship management.
• Do your research. It does not take long in today’s tech world to find out some information and facts about your Lead so do that immediately. There is the website, LinkedIn, google, ZoomInfo – so many resources to help you prepare your call. But that should only take 15 minutes. Do not let that delay the callback!
• Become skillful with your questions. if you have sold your service or product for a number of years, you know why a Lead is typically coming to your website and looking for resources. Be prepared with probing, insightful questions that you can ask them about their business and their concerns. This lead management best practice will prevent you from going into a sales pitch. Your job in nurturing a Lead is to peel back the onion, ask all the great and difficult questions you need to ask in order to determine if in fact, the Lead is a Prospect.
• Don’t sell on the call, set an appointment. This is a tough best practice for many salespeople. Of course, you must establish some credibility on the call by sharing a story or two about how you have helped other people or companies address a similar problem. But salespeople, beware, this is not usually the time to go deep into your solutions, unless the buyer has made it very clear they are ready to buy. In most businesses with longer sales cycles, it helps salespeople to uncover the problem or opportunity, identify that the Lead wants to address it and agree to schedule a time to talk more deeply and for you, the salesperson, to prepare.
• Don’t send automated, non personalized emails. Most companies have lists of prospects that have over time, inquired or encountered your resources and your company will likely send them periodical emails with information. But for a Lead that is new and inquiring about your services, do not default to an automated approach. A best practice for lead relationship management is to make certain that your communications with this Lead are personal, relevant and timely. Otherwise you risk the threat of “Unsubscribe”.
• Don’t give up until… There is varying research on how many times you should contact a Lead but it is more then once and probably less than 20, if no response. Buyers are busy and while they do not need to be pestered, it will pay off if you reach out consistently with helpful information. Nurturing a lead could involve sharing some of your website assets, stories and capability statements.
• Stay in touch. Once you have determined that a Lead is not going any further, it pays off to stay in touch. We have had Leads turn into customers years after their inquiry. It is a fine line to walk but if you have marketing resources to help, stay in touch with an email here and there or connect on LinkedIn and follow their company. A best practice in lead relationship management is not being short sited in your approach. If you are a seasoned salesperson with a great service or product to offer, you are not going anywhere and can develop a relationship even if the Lead is not a prospect today.
• Continue to Give. There is a book we recommend in our sales training called Go-Givers Sell More but Bob Burg and John David Mann. Order it and read it today. Selling is about Giving and our last lead relationship management best practice is to give. There is nothing that beats a sincere desire and effort to help your Lead solve their problem and grow their company.