It’s Sales and Marketing executives’ job to make sure employees are excited and working at maximum productivity. Returning from the holidays your sales team will either hit the ground running, or take a while to shift out of their food coma and revive their engines. How fast teams come out of the gates affects your employee’s mood, sets the pace, and ultimately has an impact on whether you win or lose for the year. Here are ways to create the right motivation to kick your sales team into overdrive right from the start.
Make 2016 Sales Goals Meaningful
Motivating your team to execute against your 2016 strategy is critical to gain alignment and achieve your goals. Of course there’s the old reliable “here’s some cash” method to incentivize them, but that’s the bare minimum and a bit old school. Employees, and especially the upcoming workforce, expect more than monetary rewards. They want to be inspired.
Once you have a set of goals in place, make sure people know the story of why, and make them care. Here are some ideas:
- Crowdsource, or at the very least get feedback on the goals from sales. They will buy in more if they feel they were included, which is a must if the new goals mean they have higher quotas, a smaller territory, or both.
- Communicate out to the sales team early and frequently as to what the goals are, who was part of those decisions, and why they exist. Why do we want to grow by 100%? What does that mean for the company, but also for an individual salesperson?
- Put in place a corporate social responsibility program to show your employees that you care, and that as you achieve your goals, something meaningful happens in their community. Salespeople can be coin-operated at work, but we all care about impact when it hits home.
Align The Entire Organization
If sales goals don’t fit with company goals, there can be a cultural divide between departments. Coordinating goals between groups and throughout sales teams is critical to success. There are a number of ways in which companies achieve alignment:
- Break down borders by clearly communicating how high level goals flow into departmental goals, and how each group relies on each other for results.
- Create cross functional goals with shared incentives. For example, if customer upsells hits a certain amount while customer satisfaction remains above a certain level, the sales and support teams get a fun work outing together.
- Give salespeople opportunities to better understand other roles, and also the bigger picture by letting them sit in on strategic meetings (assuming they have hit their activity levels). Also, do the same for other groups by letting them sit in on sales calls, which helps them empathize more with the work that goes into closing a deal.
Empower Front Line Managers
Your sellers spend more time with their manager than any other person in the company, which is why it’s so important to empower them to motivate their team in the most effective way possible.
- Facilitate training, content, and communication for frontline sales managers so that they have all the tools they need to do their job. This can be important for retention– as the saying goes; “You don’t quit your company, you quit your manager.”
- Every region and managerial style is different. Let sales managers create specific team goals and personalize incentives to match what their employees care about.
- Continuously check the pulse of your sales team through these managers to understand how motivated your sales force is, and where you need to further invest.
Cultivate a Community
The best motivation comes from feeling like you’re in a positive, supportive environment. Sales culture is formed in a lot of ways, but like food it is best when it grows organically.
- Give your sales team a pick me up by offering healthy outlets including options for morning or lunchtime classes, exercise, etc.
- Celebrate successes by creating a place to share win stories and sales generated content that won the deal. This gives sales a pat on the back while contributing to the success of everyone else. Plus, it’s free content to curate for Marketing.
- Promote an open culture where sales reps can share best practices, what is working, answers to questions, and objection-handling techniques. Just as importantly, promote the sharing of failures too as there is just as much, if not more, to learn from.
Gamify Everything
There is no doubt salespeople love friendly competition, but the first question before gamifying anything is, what behaviors do you want to incentivize? Some examples that will help add a bit of nitrus to your sales engine are:
- Make sure you measure and reward sales based on call conversion to first meeting, open rates, and buyer engagement rate across content. Activities such as number of calls or meetings mean nothing without conversion to outcomes.
- Be sure to create competition among teams with points and goals. Team dynamics are proven to get better results many times, and team members share best practices in the process.
- Fantasy sports have taken off, but are also a controversial subject for some companies. Another idea might be “fantasy forecasting” by rewarding people who are closest to quota for themselves, their region, or the entire company.
Implement Cutting Edge Technology
Implementing Sales Enablement platforms, devices, and other technologies that make reps more productive is a big way to excite sales and show them you are investing in their success. It also gives leadership the metrics and feedback to understand what is moving the needle, and highlight which sellers might need a pick me up session based on low customer engagement. A few things to keep in mind as you evaluate each technology are:
- Ensure your platform is able to meet the needs of inside reps, field teams, marketers, and partners in one experience.
- Make sure content producers have a powerful, simple, and secure way of managing content.
- Check the depth of analytics to ensure they contain measurement of sales activity,content effectiveness, and customer engagement.
- Prove out that the new platforms are easy to implement, integrate, and gain adoption.
This article originally appeared on the Showpad blog.