Creating an effective motivation program for your sales team

Creating an effective motivation program for your sales team

Whether you’re managing an on-roll, third-party or channel sales team, keeping your sales or frontline team motivated probably has a spot on your priority list.

It’s a good idea too.

Your frontline team goes through cycles of objections, rejections and negotiations in a month. To this we add competition, prevalent market dynamics and we’ve got good reason as to why your salesperson or frontline person’s motivation might drop.

To help keep their enthusiasm high (repeatedly, through multiple sales cycles), you’ll have to design or implement a thoughtful motivation program for your sales team. While you’ll know what motivates your team best, here are 3 sales motivation tips to help you along the way.

1. Effective sales training

1.1. Getting them field ready: Implementing a pre-floor/onboarding program is absolutely essential in providing your team with the required arsenal to fire from day one. In this program you ought to cover essential topics such as your target customer, your market and products that your sales team is supposed to focus on.

Pepper in a few assessments that will help you understand where they stand and where they need a little help.

While many companies run these sessions in person, you could also consider online methods of onboarding/training. This could be especially useful in industries such as fashion retail where hire to floor time cycles need to be reduced.

1.2. Ongoing upskilling: Your frontline is going to witness a lot of change in their sales journey. From customers to products. It’s up to you to ensure that they are ready to face change and adapt quickly.

Regular tips and tricks (in the form of short read and videos) coupled with assessments will help you measure their current understanding of the world they work in and what they need to do to perform better.

2. Incentivization

When it comes to frontline or sales teams, incentives will away stay relevant. Providing simple, easy to understand incentive plans will always nudge your team to push their performance a little further.

Whether you choose the monetary route (that include commissions, spot cash rewards) or the non-monetary route (such as holiday packages) or both, make sure you keep your plan simple enough that your team understands them, it’s easy to process for your administration, the payouts happen on time and without errors.

3. Gamification

If implemented properly, gamification could unlock untapped potential in your frontline or sales team.

Gamification methods do not need to be complex structures. They need to be easy to implement and must leverage a frontline or sales person’s need to better themselves over time and better each other when their performances are compared.

Any of your gamification methods must include these 4 aspects:

  • Visibility of their targets or goals and their performance against it. Keeping their goals always front and center will act as a constant reminder and will help them prioritize their actions to better their performance.

  • Reminders OR nudges. Your gamification initiatives must provide regular nudges based on the personnel’s performance. A “good going” or “Your target is in sight” or “Push harder’ is going get maximum mileage out of your team.

  • Visibility: Company-wide leaderboards and team visibility are going to press hard on extrinsic motivation factors.

  • A theme: Giving it a theme such as a Sales Premier League is going to make things interesting for your frontline. You could even add scoring criteria such as 1 unit sold or 1 prospect met equals 1 run/goal to keep things interesting.

We talk more about gamifying sales processes in this blog.

To summarise, in order to build a culture that motivates, you will first need to build a culture of learning, engagement and productivity. A few ways to help you get there are though consistent upskilling of teams, incentivising sales, and gamifying their performance.

Bsharp brings the tech that lets you create great engagement programs for sales teams.

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