In today's blog post, we discuss motivation in sales. The problem, in many cases, is that the sales executive in charge of getting more out of their sales team has no idea what motivates those people on the team.
Without knowing what motivates his/her employees, how could you possibly create a motivating environment?
Sales is the lifeblood of most businesses. If you're a sales manager, or sales leader, you might be wondering how to better motivate your sales team.
Unlike most sales activities that can be measured, motivation is a more difficult metric to assess, but still vital to your sales team's success.
Here are a couple of ideas to help inspire your sales team.
As many of you know, we use the Objective Management Group's (OMG) assessment to evaluate every organization that we do sales and sales management training, coaching and consulting for.
The process helps us (and our clients) determine with great accuracy the answers to these 4 questions:
Answering these four questions requires the ability to uncover at least two important contributors to improved effectiveness:
There are 6 known contributing factors that OMG uses to determine “will to sell” (click here to inquire about the pre-hire assessment tool).
A CONSISTENTLY RECURRING QUESTION
I don't believe there is a way to effectively rank those factors in terms of relevant importance. Having used the tool and delivered results to dozens of companies and hundreds of people, my experience is that these 6 work together to form a puzzle that gives you an overall picture of someone’s “will to sell”. In this article, however, I want to focus on motivation because,often, when attending my workshops, attendees consistently the question,
ARE YOU MOTIVATED?
What motivates you? If you are a manager, what is motivating your people? If you are not motivated to:
I have to ask: Why?
ALL ENCOMPASSING - MOTIVATION INVOLVES EVERYTHING
Let me address two things:
My experience – my own true, personal experience - about motivation is that when you desire something greatly in your heart, then you will live and breath the desire to make the dream a reality. Many of you know I played football at UConn. I always considered myself blessed beyond reason to have had the opportunity to make my dream a reality. But blessed does not stand alone as the only contributing factor for the scholarship.
Yes, I had some God-given talents (nature), but I also had some external factors (nurture) that contributed to my success. Those factors were Mom and Dad and the attitudes they instilled in me regarding hard work, anything is possible, don’t give up, and success requires commitment. I learned early on that, if you really want to accomplish something great in your life, you must be willing to give up some things to get where you want to go.
THE REAL DEAL – MOTIVATION IS PERSONAL
When I answer the question - How do I motivate my people? - for workshop attendees, I tell them, “You cannot motivate them. Motivation is an inside-out job and they have to come to the table with their own motivation. The best you can do is create an environment where people want to come and they want to be motivated and excited because they have personal reasons to be successful.”
While assessing numerous organizations, we have found three things that hinder the motivation and success of the sales team: 1) 90% of the sales managers don’t believe they need to know what motivates their sales people. 2) 25% of the sales managers are not motivated to be successful in the role of sales manager and 3) Virtually 100% of the salespeople lack personal goals, lack a personal goal plan and fail to have a process in place to track if they are achieving goals.
Without knowing what motivates your salespeople, how could you possibly create a motivated environment or sales team?