Motivating your sales force in 2015

Five building blocks for a sales manager for a motivated sales force:

The reality is that the sale environment is now even more difficult than ever, but the power is in your hands to have the best team in business. When you are a sales manager, you must recognise that you have the power to motivate your sales force and determine their success. Following are five innovative, interactive and effective building blocks for every sales manager to motivate their sales force effectively.

• Lead by example – It is necessary that you, as the leader of your team, must implement the values, attitude and principles that you would like to see in your sales force. The attitude you have about work will reflect directly on your team. Have a positive attitude for a positive sales force. A few examples about the values and principles you might want to see in your sales force are, being on time for meetings, having loyalty towards the company and relationships and going about with integrity.

• Schedule individual meetings – Meet with every individual once a month. By doing this, you can address the individual’s strong points and weaknesses in the sales process. You must also determine what motivates the individual and what discourage him/her. This empowers you too plan and tailor a motivation plan on how to train or motivate each person to be the most efficient possible.

• Create personal goals – *Personal goals: a desired result a person or system envisions, plans and commits to achieve.*When having individual meetings with your sales force, develop their personal goals. Create personal goals in the work environment which will bring them closer to the goals they might have outside the working environment. Vision and dreams is what drives a person. Without vision an individual will perish and time spent dreaming is never time wasted. Having a dream like buying a new car or travelling, will motivate them to work harder to be able to reach these. Let them print out a picture of their vision or dream and put it against a wall in their working environment or in your office. By actually seeing what they want to achieve, they will be motivated to develop a healthy hard working attitude.

• Focus on the “we” mindset and develop SMART goals - *we mindset*: recognising that everyone is working together as a team to reach a corporate goal. Enabling each individual to not only thinks about the conciseness on a personal level, but also about the impact it will have on the whole team.*SMART goals: setting activity-based goals that is specific, measurable, achievable, result-focused and time bound.*Develop SMART goals for every week in order to balance the pressure of closing a deal throughout the whole month. In example, making a certain amount of cold calls every day or setting a certain amount of appointments per week. Along with these SMART goals, also make team goals with awards if the goals are reached by the end of the week or penalties for the team as a hole when the goals are not achieved. Individuals with a “we” mindset are also encouraged to work on fixing problems as it will not only have a impact on them personally but on the whole team.These will bring an attitude of working together on reaching goals.

• Create “outside the box” competition – Use weekly KEY performance indicator activities and make them fun!*KEY performance indicators: a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a team is achieving key business objectives. Key performance indicators are used to evaluate the successes at reaching corporate targets.*

An example of making this indicator activities fun: arrange an hour of cold calling to make appointments. Each member of the team must do cold calling for this hour and get as many appointments as possible. When the hour is over, set up a mini-golf course with office equipment. The amount of appointments each individual got is the amount of hits they have to get the ball in the hole. The person who reaches the best score may win extra money or even a free lunch at their favourite restaurant.

Know that you have these five building blocks that will motivate your sales force; I will leave you with a final word. Make sure your sales force knows that you are proud of them whenever they reach the goals and targets! Your level of encouragement and recognition will determine their level of performance.