The dream of every dedicated sales leader and the key to achieving sales team excellence is understanding what drives and inspires their people to perform at their highest potential. What are the competencies and behaviors of those leaders who seem so talented at helping others achieve their very best? We rely on the pioneer and #1 sales management evaluation by Objective Management Group to help understand exactly what it takes to ‘motivate’ a sales team. Simply stated: The Motivating Competency measures how effectively a sales manager understands what motivates their salespeople and how they can keep them motivated.
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.
