151 Quick Ideas to Motivate Your Sales Force
By Frank Horvath and Julie Vincent
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About this ebook
Traditional ways of motivating a sales force have included money, incentives, contests and even turnover (regardless of performance). While it's true being a sales professional is not for everyone, there is a way to identify, build and retain a top-notch motivated sales force. The trick is to build and keep a sales team that delivers sustainable results.
The insights included in this book are designed to shift your thinking about traditional ways of motivating sales professionals you manage. It categorizes key sales-motivating management skills, tools and techniques while incorporating the art and science of sales management, leadership and the human dynamic. In this book you'll learn:
- Coaching and Development
- Sales force Processes and Systems
- Keys to Sales force Leadership
- Reward, Recognition and Incentives
Sales managers that learn, know and implement a next-in-class approach to motivating their sales professionals will reap high rewards and beat their competition.
Frank Horvath
Frank R. Horvath, MBA, is a sales leadership professional, management consultant and a certified skill and competency analyst with more than 20 years of experience, including positions as a former Vice President of Business Development, Managing Director of a global consulting firm, President of Integrated Group Synergy, LLC and now Principal Consultant/Solutions Architect for The Newman Group (a Korn/Ferry Company). Through direct sales experience, education in psychology and study of effective sales competencies, he has directly impacted the "top line" of start-ups, mid-sized, and Fortune 500 companies. Horvath and his family live in Indianapolis, Indiana.
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Book preview
151 Quick Ideas to Motivate Your Sales Force - Frank Horvath
Introduction
Ever think the only way to motivate your sales force is with money? That might work for a short while, but think again. There are more lasting ways to motivate your sales professionals, and that’s where this book will motivate you to think long term, with the goal of engaging and retaining those top-notch sales employees.
151 Quick Ideas to Motivate Your Sales Force contains useful and practical ideas to keep enthusiasm and pride in your sales department—everything from how to develop your sales professionals to how to fire a customer. It discusses how to stretch goals and objectives, how to set up a scoreboard of sales results, and how to define clear accountabilities.
This book also talks about subjects not often found in sales manuals (the human behavior side of the business) such as how to use failure as a learning tool, how to establish a mentoring program, and even how to shed the strip club mentality.
In today’s economy, hitting those sales goals is a must. And we all know how expensive it is to carry a sales associate who doesn’t pull his or her weight, and lose those who do. For example, do you take the time and effort to understand the family dynamics of your sales professionals? Your sales professionals are human beings, and they are influenced by their families and by what’s going on in their lives at any given time. Done correctly, it can be helpful to get to know your sales team members on a deeper level.
151 Quick Ideas to Motivate Your Sales Force discusses sales from the company’s perspective, from the manager’s perspective, and from the sales professional’s perspective. The result is a unique blend of practical suggestions to help your sales associates relish business opportunities and share in the success.
In short, everybody wins when you have a stable, talented, and motivated sales force. In today’s world, the stakes are high. So start reading and see how far you can take your sales team. Take a minute to remember when you were a new sales professional ready to take on the world. Help your team become more successful, celebrate the wins, and contribute to the future. The time is now.
1
Share and Make Sure Sales Professionals Understand the Realities of Your Business
One of the biggest assumptions sales leaders and managers make is that sales professionals really understand how the business operates and how it makes a profit. Do not assume everyone understands the realities of your business. Ask yourself, do sales professionals understand how you make a profit and what’s important to your operations? How about competitive intelligence? Have you researched and collected current
Assignment
Begin inserting financial operating metrics and competitive intelligence into your regular meetings with your sales professionals. Also use one-on-one conversations as an opportunity to share what the business is focused on, including the impact to sales, cash flow, and profitability.
competitor information that can be shared? Do they understand your income statement, balance sheet, and cash flows? How about your strategy, business brand, and key goals and objectives?
Epilogue
The best sales professionals relish opportunities to share in the realities of your business. This enables them to sustain a competitive advantage when selling against overly optimistic sales competitors.
2
Align Your Sales Professionals to the Likes
of the Customer/Client
This is about relationships that your sales professionals want to have with the customers/clients, and not about the fluffy likes
that unskilled sales professionals put stock in as those that work with their customers and clients. Customers and clients know what they like
in a business relationship. Sometimes it’s purely transactional—and they only want to purchase your product/service at the
Assignment
Create a client/customer profile that includes their general likes
in developing business relationships. Share this information with the sales team and others within your organization to ensure this is used and helps facilitate building prospect relationships and maintaining current customer relationships.
lowest possible price. A relationship doesn’t matter.
On the flip side and most important side of the sales process, it’s your sales professional and her/his relationship that matters. It’s also about the investment he/she makes in solving a business problem. Skills and competencies associated with your sales staff will have to be matched to the likes
(or, defined differently, preferences
) of the customer/client. Customers and clients don’t know what they don’t like. It will take extra effort for your sales professionals to uncover the likes
or preferences
as part of their relationships, when they buy products and services or solve their business problems. Customers/clients are also likely to pay extra, or value the relationship more when their likes
and their needs as an organization are matched to the sales professional.
People don’t like to feel as though they are being sold. Rather, they like the opportunity to make decisions about their purchases. Coach your sales professionals to focus on allowing your clients and prospects to feel that they are the ones making the buying decision. You will experience a marked increase in closed.
Epilogue
Business relationships grow when you understand how your customers like
to buy, not to be sold. Being sold imakes your client decline a sale.
3
Collect Feedback From Your Customers/Clients for Improvement
Improvement in your sales performance is an ongoing task. This is a motivational factor imbedded in the DNA of all top sales professionals. Your support in collecting constructive feedback will not only be welcome, but also will be a demonstration that you
Assignment
Develop a formal written and verbal customer survey process. Build a process that includes commitments to regular intervals of formal feedback and review of results.
are truly trying to comprehend the process of feedback—not just for the sake of collecting feedback, but for the importance of learning how to improve the sales process. This translates into a motivating factor for your sales professionals. This should be a major priority, but don’t get confused about only collecting feedback from your sales team. Sharing objective feedback also builds confidence in your customer relationships. By doing this on a regular and routine basis, your sales team will understand that it is an important part of their jobs to provide you with important feedback that they hear from their customers /clients. Used correctly with your sales team, feedback can also be tied to formal individual and team performance coaching.
If the information is handled constructively, your sales team will use it as a motivator to solve customer problems, address customer inquiries and complaints, and be willing to proactively provide you with a continuous loop of constructive process improvement-focused feedback. Along with your expectation to provide collected feedback on a regular basis, this will facilitate a continuous improvement philosophy for your sales team’s ongoing growth and development as sales professionals.
Epilogue
Feedback is the cornerstone of sales process improvement. This applies to your customers/clients as well as your sales team.
4
Benchmark Individual and Team Sales Performance
It’s true that what you measure gets done, and top-notch sales professionals want to be benchmarked. This is the only way a top professional gets motivated—by going above and beyond goals and objectives that have been set for past performance! Sales professionals are motivated by their ability to beat and exceed sales targets. Once these targets are set and agreed to, a top-notch sales professional will exhibit behaviors that coordinate her/his time and daily activities to beat and exceed sales goals and targets. Also remember that benchmarking sales metrics for performance allows you to see gaps in performance
Assignment
Identify and document your key sales performance metrics. Identify your competition’s key sales metrics. Include this in formal individual and team performance appraisals.
that need to be addressed. In addition to increasing individual motivation, benchmarking can provide you, as the manager, visibility into the benchmarks your competition uses and perspective on how to beat them.
Take note as a sales manager: Your competition benchmarks their performance against yours. Your sales professionals are also knowledgeable about what’s expected of their competitors’ sales teams.
Epilogue
Because it’s in a sales professional’s DNA to be motivated by metrics, goals, and objectives, benchmark their performance in order to help them understand how their performance stacks up.
5
Align Sales With All Departments
Don’t be a sales manager novice. If you want to be the best, then keep in mind that sales planning, budgeting, and forecasting must align with all the resource requirements of marketing, finance, operations, customer service, and manufacturing. This should be one of your major priorities on a recurring and annual basis. This also needs to be an ongoing part of sales operations management during any given