Practical Sales Team Motivation Ideas

 
“How do I motivate my sales team who are remote, or field based?”

It’s a question our trainers get asked a lot and is a very popular topic in our Sales Management Training that we delivery.

I know many organisations that have salespeople out in the field or who are working from home, and they cannot meet them personally.

So, a few questions come up:

1. How do you keep them motivated?
2. How do you keep them focused?
3. How do you correct mistakes that they make remotely if you’re not there?

The key is that when you have a long-distance relationship with your salespeople, every moment of contact must be motivational but also educational.

You MUST also HELP them, not just pump them up.

The problem is that to help them you must correct problems; you must address negative issues. But if you address negative issues when you have salespeople that you may not see for a while, those negative feelings can linger. So, the question is how can you motivate and address negative issues at the same time and from afar?

We have a comprehensive Sales Manager’s Guidebook that you can work through and here are 3 sales motivation ideas to get you started.

 

3 Must Have Sales Motivation Ideas

First, no matter what it is that your company sells, or how your organisation operates, you need to do three things:

1. Have regular contact with the sales force, if not in person, then either by telephone or virtually – taking in information and relaying only positive responses

2. Uplift and inspire during that regular contact

3. Have regular sales meetings, if not in person, then by teleconference or virtual and combine the information from #1 and #2.
Let me explain.

Sales Manager’s Must Have Regular Contact

No matter what your company circumstances or how spread out your sales force are, the best sales managers have periodic contact with every member of the team, either every day, once a week or once a month, based on your sales model.

If your sales model is such that salespeople can and should close a sale every day, then you should be in contact every day. If your sales cycle is much longer, then perhaps you contact each salesperson once a week.

Simply stress that at the end of each workday or at the end of each week, each salesperson MUST call you.

If you have salespeople who can work very late in the evening in the field, then you as the sales manager should NEVER be done with your workday until ALL your salespeople are finished. If they are working – so are you.

Then, during this call, all you want to do is draw out information as to what happened that day or week and inspire the salesperson. You just want information on what happened and then uplift the salesperson. The main thing you do not want to do is criticise or correct anything. You must present that you are not “looking over their shoulders,” or checking in on them. All you want is data on what happened.

Let me give you an example.

 
The Sales Manager has five salespeople who are spread out across a wide geographic area selling point of sale computerised cashier systems to small, independent businesses and restaurants. The sales model is to do five sales presentations every day and close one sale every day.

They have every salesperson call in at the end of their workday, every day and they have a weekly sales meeting every Monday morning to start the week, via teleconference or virtual.

Now with this set up, here is what you do:

As salespeople call in, the sales manager asks tons of questions, and does everything to get the salesperson to describe their day—but keeping it positive.

As the salesperson explains a bad day in the field, the sales manager takes note of those negative things that happened and of the mistakes the salesperson made, but they do NOT attempt to correct them or even inform the salesperson at that time.

In fact, if the salesperson begins to explain all the details of a big sale gone wrong, where they are aware of their mistakes, the sales manager tries to get off the subject.

The salesperson may say things that make the manager cringe, but the manager does not say, “Oh, no, you should not have done that!” Instead, the manager says, “Hey, you put in a hard day’s work, and you know the numbers are going to pay you back!”

Am I saying that this late-night phone call should be a rah-rah pep rally?

Yes, but much more. It must be a pep rally, but you must get information about what happened.