How to motivate your sales team in difficult times

Mastering Online Sales: A Series For Effective Sales Team Leaders

Chapter 4 – How to motivate your sales team in difficult times

Having a sales team that constantly fuels itself with motivation and stimulation to sell and produce represents a significant competitive advantage. This makes a huge difference between your company and competitors. It is equally true that a group consists of individuals who live their experiences and emotions. Furthermore, what counts is also the way they face the difficulties and challenges that the business world places in front of them.

Everyone has bad days and needs the right motivation to constantly express themselves at high levels at work. To carry out any project, you know that you need the maximum collaboration of all the team members involved.

Unfortunately, this can drop if team members are heavily influenced by both internal and external negative factors. This can lead the whole group to reduce its performance, due to the very difficult time it is experiencing.

Have you ever felt a pinch of demotivation in your collaborators? Do you have the feeling that they carry out their tasks without expressing their full potential? Would you like to see more participation and attachment to the cause?

Having said that, what solutions can you adopt to motivate your sales team, especially in the most challenging times?

Here’s a list of actions you can take:

5 Strategies To Keep Your Sales Team Members Motivated

1. Make your sales force feel important. Your employees need to feel important and to know that their contribution is crucial to the success of the company. Otherwise, they can easily become unmotivated and this could have negative effects on the sales themselves. Therefore, it is necessary to define and share the values pursued by the company. The intent is to increase the team members’ awareness of the company’s ultimate purpose. They must understand how their work can be crucial. Therefore, it is necessary that they are involved in company policies and are continually updated on changes and commercial strategies. This will increase both team spirit and individual motivation and motivation.
2. Be transparent and communicate effectively. Communicating effectively means paying attention to the interlocutor, evaluating the context and understanding the best way to present your ideas. To do this, you need to be aware of the effect your words will have on others. In difficult moments, transparency and clarity of communication between a sales manager and his team are essential to increase awareness of the expectations to be met and to understand what to aim for. Team members need to know exactly what can happen if they meet or not these expectations and consider what risks may be encountered. The leader of a sales team must be part of the team itself, be an integral part of it, identify its weaknesses and guide its members to overcome challenges.
3. Recognise and reward your team for well-done tasks. Each member of your sales team is unique, and what motivates one may not work as well for the others. So, it is important to find time to talk with your collaborators to understand what sort of incentives can work best for them. Giving prizes or bonuses, not necessarily in cash, is a great way to celebrate the work of your team members. This will incentivize them to continue and work with the same desire and motivation for future goals and rewards.
4. Invest in the training of your collaborators. Taking up part of your time as a sales manager to educate your team is certainly a wise decision because your collaborators can constantly update their knowledge. In this way, they will know how to move better and what tools to use to increase their productivity, organize their time in the best possible way and avoid waste. In particular, short courses are among the most common methods for updating the skills of a sales team. These allow its members to exchange information and notions about what they have learned and how they intend to apply it to workflows.
5. Coach your sales team. Coaching can drastically contribute to increasing sales performance which is why you can consider it a priority. The intervention of a professional coach in the company favours the increase in turnover through the improvement of business processes. The goal is to consolidate the leader and the sales team’s awareness of their potential thanks to tools such as active listening and emotional intelligence.

In Conclusion

Now that you know how to effectively incentivize and motivate your sales team, especially during particularly complicated times. Over time, you will see the spirit of initiative and the desire to do well grow in your collaborators, and the results will not delay in manifesting themselves.

The task of a true leader is also to demonstrate firsthand that he can find the motivation and energy to face the challenges of every day and pursue his own goals.

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Tagged as business, coaching, leadership, sales, team, work