What does it really take to have a team of passionate sales reps driven to perform? Take a look at these 7 things successful Sales Managers do.
Ultimately, you cannot really motivate anyone. You can only create a motivating or demotivating environment and allow the individual to respond. Motivation comes from within. With that said, here are seven ways you can create conditions to help your sales reps maintain their desire for success:
1. Know what motivates each rep
Discover what each team members’ personal goals are and why. What do they really want in life? What are their goals? If they want to make a lot of money — then for what purpose? Buy a bigger house? Prepare for their children’s college? Vacation? Caring for elderly parents? Philanthropy?
Regardless of what the ultimate source of motivation is, it’s your job as a sales manager to know it. This is the ground floor of sales leadership.
2. Connect performance with their personal goals
Keep their goals in front of them at all times. Affirm their decision to achieve their goals. Since it’s easy to lose sight of your goals, support your reps by reminding them of their goals.
Connect their daily activities to the achievement of their goals such as: # of cold calls, maintaining margins, focusing on the ideal customer profile, leveraging referrals, tightly qualifying buyers, etc. Each activity takes them closer to achieving their goals.
3. Direct your sales coaching towards sales reps achieving their goals (not quotas)
Your focus as a sales manager should be on coaching your sales reps – not sales quotas. What I mean is your conversations should be focused on developing their skills — not browbeating them for unmet sales quotas.
Sales quota conversations should be counted in seconds — 20-30 seconds at most. The other 39+ hours per week should be about the quantity and quality of activities your sales rep is engaged in.
4. Assess reps to determine any roadblocks preventing them from achieving their goals
Use an in-depth sales assessment tool to identify their personal strengths and weaknesses. Misdiagnosis leads to frustration on both parts since remedies don’t work. Instead, assess your sales reps over and above personality in order to determine their capacities to fulfill each step of the sales process.
If they lack confidence, you need to know why. If they lack organizational skills, then you need to help them develop a simple plan for getting organized.
5. Create a plan together to help them achieve their goals
Once you diagnose any roadblocks that might impede performance, then develop the plan. For example, is they have a lot of unsigned contracts, then they most likely are not qualifying buyers properly.
Go back and clearly define what is and what is not a qualified buyer. Help them to discriminate between those who will buy and those who won’t. Guide them to politely move on from unqualified buyers and focus their time building a healthy pipeline.
6. Discover how to best communicate with each other
One way to truly demotivate a sale rep is not understanding how they communicate and how then need to be communicated to. In addition, they need to know the same about you. Discuss your expectations for emails (short, long, detailed, bullet points, frequency, etc.) In addition, some sales reps will call their Sales Manager with endless questions.
Communicate your Call/Do Not Call list so they know what they can decide for themselves and what requires your approval. This will prevent unnecessary personality and communication conflicts and untimely create better conditions for the coach/player relationship.
7. Determine the ideal environment for them to work in
Finally, Great sales managers create an ideal environment for their sales reps. Do they need a closer relationship with you or are they more hands off? Do you expect them to start, drive and close sales on their own, or will you assist on big deals? What level of data entry is required on the part of the sales rep? These and other questions must be answered in order to create conditions for your sales rep to thrive.