Sales figures slumping. A team that lacks energy and isn’t bringing home results. Reps doing their own thing without real success. It's an all too familiar story, and it can stop the bell of business success from ringing.
When the sales sparkle starts to dim, it's time to shine a light on motivation. Here are seven ways to recharge your team.
- Empowerment: An effective sales manager gives people the tools to handle appointment setting, communication and closing. Don’t pull the reins tighter when results slip. Give your team the freedom and the means to change.
- Reinforcement: Within one week of training, 80% of new skills are lost, and 87% within the first month. One-time training isn't enough. As teams revert to old habits, motivation fades. Positive reinforcement builds confidence and the self-belief to win.
- Accountability: Motivating your team is really about influencing behavior. That means holding people to account, not through fear, but by creating a real picture of their pipeline and customer situations that they can face and own.
- A clear pipeline process: From first contact through discovery to close, a recognized methodology steers behavior. It acts as an anchor and makes progress easier and faster, which is motivating in itself.
- Mentoring: Alongside training and new tools, a sales leader's role is to create an open environment. Growth fuels motivation, and that only happens with transparent, real-world dialogue between managers and reps.
- A workable CRM: CRMs like Salesforce are often under-used. They produce lots of data but rarely give teams a clear, active picture of their business. Build your sales process into the CRM in a practical way that's easy to use and manage.
- Problem solving: Nothing is as demotivating as wasted time and effort. Rollercoaster results, slow deals and talented but inefficient people lead to slumps. Identifying the problem is halfway to solving it.
Originally published on LinkedIn on September 30, 2015.