How to Motivate Your Sales Team: 5 Easy and Effective Tips

Managing an efficient sales team requires a multitude of management techniques to get the best out of your salespeople. As a sales manager, one of the most crucial elements to get right is sales team motivation. Finding ways to motivate your team, compared to neglecting this element of management, could be the difference between your sales team being successful or unsuccessful. Of course, you want to empower success within your sales team and motivate them to achieve the highest possible success levels. 

But how do you nurture sales team motivation? Thankfully, in this article, we explore five easy and effective tips for how to motivate your sales team. 

1) Get to Know Your Sales Team

If you don’t make an effort as a sales manager to get to know your team, how can you expect your salespeople to make an effort and be motivated to support you in return? So, before you embark on a mission to motivate your sales team, you must first get to know the individuals within your group.

To do this, you need to break your team down into the individual people within your team. You need to know what motivates your people, the personality types within the group, and, ultimately, what makes each person tick. 

Although everyone within your team should already have the skills and potential to develop while also being a cultural fit for your team, it’s important to appreciate everyone is different. So, you need to approach each team member in a way that suits them, from how you interact and communicate with them to how you manage and praise them. For example, one individual may prefer face-to-face feedback, while others like this communication over email. 

Your chosen approaches to each individual will differ, but being honest and transparent should remain a constant. Regular one-to-one meetings are great for getting to know the individuals within your team and for keeping up-to-date with how they’re getting on. 

Once you know the people within your group, you’ll better understand how to manage your overall sales team, enabling you to get the best out of everyone. You need to aim to build trust and a sense of community within your team, allowing you to build long-lasting working relationships with your salespeople. 

2) Set Goals and SMART Targets

Setting goals and targets are essential to establishing and building a motivated and positive team. Transparent targets allow employees to monitor and motivate their progress. Providing clear goals also provides employees with a framework for translating the organisation's broader goals while showing you care about the future development of your salespeople.

Each of your salespeople will be unique in their own right, and therefore they will also be motivated by different goals and targets. For example, some individuals will be motivated by competing in sales team contests, while others may be motivated by personal growth or increased income. 

As a sales manager, leader or CEO, you get to decide on the goals and targets you set for your salespeople but be open to their opinion. Ultimately, you and the employees within your sales team need to agree on achievable but challenging targets - whether these are individual targets or goals the whole team contributes to. These goals and targets should be realistic and support the progression of you, your sales team, and your business. 

You may find it helpful to follow the SMART acronym when setting goals and targets for your sales team

• Specific - a clear overview of the goal
• Measurable - how the progress of the goal will be tracked

• Achievable - set realistic and attainable goals

• Relevant - ensure the goal relates to the individual, team, or business
• Time-bound - a date for when the goal will be achieved

When creating goals for your salespeople, you may want to set them multiple targets spread across different dates. For example, you may set short-term daily targets, goals to hit by the end of the week, or more longer-term targets that need to be met at the end of each month or quarter. Whichever method you go for, be sure to monitor the progress of your salespeople and help keep them on track to achieving these goals and targets. 

3) Sales Training to Upskill or Reskill Your Salespeople

Each sales team member, including you, has room for growth. So whether it's upskilling a new or existing employee or reskilling an experienced salesperson, how can you expect your team to improve and stay up-to-date with the fast-moving world of sales without regular training? Not only that but incorporating frequent sales training can give your team a motivational boost. It shows you care about their progression and gives them something to work toward. 

Despite the many positives, as you know, sales can be a highly pressured and stressful career from time to time. Therefore, adding sales training to your team's working week is an excellent tool for giving your team a break from their relentless sales work in a way that keeps their brains ticking. 

Hosting internal sharing sessions could be a solution to your sales training. Here you can host training sessions where you or other senior members of your business provide support to your wider sales team. If your organisation doesn't have a culture of sharing knowledge, then you and your team might miss out on untapped resources. Improving your sharing culture can develop a strong employee bond and build faster solution time to combat problems.

We appreciate that finding the time and resources to conduct sales training is easier said than done. Thankfully, Pareto has created a catalogue of training programmes to help you realise your sales team's potential. Discover more about our sales training here. 

4) Reward Your Sales Team

Rewarding your salespeople is a must for increasing motivation within your sales team. Recognising your team's great work is crucial, be it monetary rewards like increased commission and pay rises or non-monetary rewards like trips away, nights out, or free lunches.

Similarly to some of the other entries in our list, rewarding your people will show them that you care about them and appreciate their work. In addition, certain rewards like days away can build team morale and the working relationships within your group of salespeople. 

You may want to include rewards that benefit the whole team's performance and recognise individual performances as well. Whatever rewards you introduce, be sure to get the opinion of your sales team. If your team members are invested in your rewards scheme, they're more likely to be motivated to work towards these rewards. 

5) Realise the Potential of Your Salespeople

Finally, another meaningful way to motivate your sales team is to help your salespeople realise their potential. Effectively, this tip relates to everything we've mentioned already, but additionally, it refers to your investment into the careers and lives of the individuals within your team.

You want to show your salespeople that you care about their personal and professional progression and go out of your way to support them in the best possible way. Providing this level of care will translate to increased motivation from your team members. Ultimately, if you help your salespeople realise their potential, you will discover the potential of your sales team and your business. 

Find Your Potential with Pareto

We are motivated to support top talent and businesses to realise their potential. At Pareto, we’ve been training and developing salespeople and leaders for over 20 years. 

So, if you need motivated and well-trained salespeople or want to learn how you can develop your leadership and management training as a sales manager, we can help.

Alternatively, get in touch today and discover how we can help you.