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Five Steps To Motivating And Retaining Great Salespeople

Written by: Will Turner

Article Overview: As a sales manager or business owner, you can focus on these five steps to motivate and retain your top performers.

Five Steps To Motivating And Retaining Great Salespeople

If you think that having the best sales team is all about the right incentives and money, you’re wrong. Not to say that a good compensation program is not important, it just isn’t enough. And it’s secondary to other factors.

There are five things that you can do in a sales management role to make sure that your sales team performs and is dedicated to growing your company. By incorporating them into your plan, you will have happier and more productive salespeople.

1. Set Clear Expectations – Salespeople perform best when they know what is expected of them. A salesperson’s goals should be fair and reasonable. That’s not to say that the goals should not stretch them.

Getting buy-in from the individual sales reps is critical when setting expectations. The best way to do this is to solicit the salesperson’s feedback and involvement in setting their goals. Failure to do so will limit the salesperson’s ownership and can create an “us vs. them” mentality (i.e. “My boss is always raising my goals and doesn’t understand what I’m dealing with. My goals are totally unrealistic. He just doesn’t understand. I can’t do everything he wants me to.”)

2. Create The Right Systems – To have a highly functioning sales team, you must develop appropriate marketing and sales strategies for your products and services and the prospects that you sell to. In addition, you need to develop systems that will support these strategies.

For example, if one of your marketing strategies is to drive traffic to your website and develop leads; do you have a system in place for handling those leads? What happens with an inquiry for more information? Is each inquiry handled in an appropriate and systematic way? One of the biggest obstacles to success is a “winging it” approach. Make sure that you create the systems outlining the detailed steps necessary for your sales success.

3. Develop A Customer-Focused Sales Culture – What is your sales culture? Is everyone in your organization involved and/or supportive of the selling process? Or is there some conflict between the sales department and the operations staff? Often, salespeople get caught up in the role of client advocate because if they don’t, no one else will. And sometimes, the demands on the salespeople can be unrealistic so they react by over-promising which puts an unnecessary and unwanted burden on the operations staff.

The best companies overcome internal challenges by clearly defining and performing in the best interest of the customer. If everyone is focused on how to serve the customer, then these internal conflicts can be avoided or, at the very least, addressed in a productive manner.

4. Hold Your Salespeople Accountable – This is the part of the job that most sales managers do poorly, but it is crucial if you want a high performing team. One of the toughest parts of managing is dealing with poor performance. Failure to do so, however, is a recipe for disaster. So address issues head-on and don’t shy away from the difficult conversations.

After you’ve set clear expectations or goals, you must determine the rewards and consequences for hitting or not reaching those goals. While reviewing and monitoring activities can be valuable, you have to recognize that it all come down to results. If the results are there, the activities to get there are inconsequential. And if the results aren’t there, there needs to be a progressive system for dealing with inadequate performance.

5. Provide Proper Training – What happens when your company hires a new salesperson? If you’re like most organizations, you probably have lots of room for improvement here. You’ll need to determine what training is appropriate and how to make it effective.

You’ll need to consider training needs from a number of angles. These include company orientation, product/service knowledge, industry knowledge and customer service philosophy. In addition, you’ll need to provide some level of sales training. This should be much more than having the new hire ride with you or a seasoned salesperson a few times and then saying, “Okay, now go do it.”

Most training programs fall short because of the process that is typically used. It’s the classic “throw a lot of information at someone” approach and hope that some of it will actually stick. The reality is that if you use this misguided approach, research indicates that after about 16 days, only 2% of the information is retained. Not only do the trainees not retain the information, but there is no hope that behavior or habits will be positively impacted. To be effective, training must incorporate the ways that adults learn. This means incorporating active engagement exercises, repetition, and specific goal setting, as well as direct application and accountability for what’s being learned.

Managing salespeople can feel like herding cats at times. By focusing and implementing the five key areas above, you will take the chance out of your sales growth.

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