Top Strategies to Motivate Your Sales Team in 2024

Imagine leading an unmotivated team. I'm sure you discover that productivity will become much more of a hassle than it should be. 

Now imagine having salespeople that lack motivation. The probability of hitting goals or targets will automatically become a thing of the past. You would have to spend all of your time figuring out why they are not doing their job right.

How can you avoid this disaster as a sales manager, you may ask?

That's where our top strategies to motivate your sales team come into play.

Salespeople are often undervalued in the workplace. They are dispensable resources that only exist to provide revenue. This perception has led to a lack of motivation amongst sales teams.

Sales managers should focus on developing their sales teams rather than on individual performance. The strategies for motivating your sales team lie in understanding their motivations and providing them with opportunities to establish themselves. 

We will walk you through the best sales team motivational tips to generate revenue. Before we get into that, first, we need to understand why motivating your sales team is vital in giving you a competitive advantage. Because if we know why, we can start looking at how we do that. 

Why is it important to motivate salespeople?

Sales teams are a critical part of any sales department of an organization. They generate revenue through their ability to close deals. 

According to studies, "47% of buyers view at least 3–5 pieces of content before they contact a sales representative." This means that without a salesperson on the other end, the business deal will never be complete.

Also, according to another study, happy employees work faster and achieve 13% higher sales than their unhappy colleagues.

Therefore, you must keep motivating your sales team to increase the business value. Other than improving your sales, a motivated sales team will:

Add More Business Leads

According to research, an unmotivated employee can cost companies $3,400 to $10,000 annually. That's a lot!

Companies with highly motivated employees are 21% more productive.

So, when you motivate your sales team, they feel supported, hence improving their commitment to your business. 

They will ensure they follow up on every customer's purchase to find more leads. Motivated salespeople will never miss your prospects' calls, making them feel appreciated and become regular customers.

Improve Sales Team Focus

The sales reps ensure they successfully achieved all the business targets. However, if they feel oppressed, they will lose focus on their roles, leading to poor outcomes. 

But what if the case is unique? 

Your motivated sales team will work day and night to ensure they hit your business targets. 

Happy Employees Serve Clients Well

Ever stepped into a store or cafe or even spoken with a company's representative and felt uncomfortable because of the "I don't care attitude" they displayed? 

This is the same with having motivated, or unmotivated sales team members interact with existing and prospective customers.

Customers come to companies ‌ to make something in their lives easier. So, if you don't motivate your sales team to achieve this, how will they close the deal?

The best way to relate with someone is to put yourself in their position and imagine what they require from you.

Happy customers make a business boom. Skeptical? Look at the image below.

If you motivate your sales team, they will be ‌ friendly to your potential clients. 

Achieve Sale Teams Quota 

There must be goals that the business wishes to achieve in your industry. The sales team adds effort to ensure you get profitable deals. 

But with a team that doesn't believe in themselves, hitting your target will be difficult. Therefore, you need to motivate your sales team to achieve the sales team quota. 

You know how important it is to motivate them, but do you know the strategies to boost your sales team? Here is all you should know. 

8 Top Strategies to Motivate Your Sales Team to Hit the Target

Motivating a sales team can be quite a challenge for a sales manager. 

As a leader, you want your sales ideas to be implemented perfectly. But with a lazy and half-hearted sales team, your beautiful business plans will lack direction. To avoid such inconvenience, always reach out to these strategies to motivate the sales team.

1. Understand Your Team and Build Trust

One of the best strategies to motivate your sales team is understanding them. You should maintain a good relationship with the salespeople to build trust and encourage teamwork. Also, ‌ understand your sales team's weaknesses and strengths to avoid building pressure on your group.

When sharing the sales improvement ideas, avoid favoring a single person as it might bring a feeling of inequality among the sales team. Instead, you can use legitimate software for the sales team to assign duties. 

Understand your sales team if they cannot achieve their quota. As Walter Scott said, 'success or failure in business is caused more by the mental attitude than mental capacities. 

Therefore, focus on inspiring sales teams other than punishing their failures. 

If you maintain rapport with your salespeople, they will trust your leadership. Stick to your sales strategies.  

2. Set Short-Term Goals

Long-term goals are crucial for every business to prosper. However, you must support short-term plans to increase your chances of success. 

We can say the same to your sales team members. You need to provide short-term goals to act as a blueprint for your primary business goals. Also, temporary goals offer a clear path to your sales teams' expectations, hence avoiding unnecessary pressure.

These goals will also help you check the achievements status of your sales team and the possibility of them achieving their sales quotas. If they miss their small targets, you should always be ready to develop new sales team strategies. This will reduce tension in the organization and improve team motivation sales. 

3. Ask the Right Questions

Remember when, as a child when you almost made the surrounding adults mad with unpleasant questions?  

That's what it takes to keep your team motivated. Ask questions; What's not working? Why is it not working? How can you make it work? With what or whom could it work? Where can it work? And when?

The more questions you ask your sales team, the closer you are to understanding the inner workings of your team's mind.

Now is not the time to keep those questions like we learned to do while growing up. I can't state enough the advantages of clear communication.

Asking the right question Is one way to boost motivation among sales reps.

Having a purpose gives a sense of importance and makes getting disillusioned harder.

Motivate salespeople in a way that fits their work style by asking the questions, "How?" Or "Why?" gives the team time to pause and evaluate fully and comprehend their past actions and what to do next. 

As a result, the decision-making process is more humanized than mechanical, and your team members are also more fulfilled.

4. Offer Incentives

Imagine giving your best, then at last nothing is given to appreciate your efforts. That's how your sales team feels when you don't reward their efforts. 

As a leader, you should always compliment their minor achievements and offer incentives to enhance their energy. If your sales team knows management will reward them for work well done, nothing can stop them from achieving their goals. 

You can set goals and announce rewards if your sales team attains them. What ‌incentives will keep your team motivated?

Let us ‌look.

How do you motivate the sales team with incentives?

Incentive Research Foundation found that businesses can increase performance by up to 44% with a proper incentive plan. Here are the best tricks to ensure your sales team is motivated:

Cash Rewards

Everyone loves money; I mean, who doesn't?

That's why many reward programs revolve around monetary rewards as a bonus for an excellent job done.

Cash rewards work, let us say 100% because it's obvious your team is at work to earn money.

Whenever a sales team makes a noticeable achievement, it is best to reward their efforts. These achievements can include exceeding the quota, successfully closing deals, or hitting the target,  

Research shows that 85% of workers prefer money over any other option. Cash rewards make sales reps feel inspired to drive the best sales results.

Product as Prizes

Products like gadgets, tv, musical instruments are a physical reminder of achievement. So it works great when thinking of motivating your sales team.

Training

Sales training (employee training) is a great strategy to motivate your sales team by building talents.

For a fact, many salespeople don't know how to sell. There are even many books written on how to sell.

However, ‌these books are useless unless you read them. If you don't read them, you will learn nothing new.

In addition, many salespeople don't understand how to use the tools available to them. For example, they don't know which marketing strategies work best. Or they don't know how to use social media to promote their products.

Professional nourishment can be a powerful motivating tool for sales reps eager to improve. This could include sales courses, workshops, training, tickets to conferences, among others.

Activity-based rewards.

As a sales leader, organize fun adventures for your sales team. It can include zip lining, skydiving, rock climbing, playing games like a tug of war, and cold calling sales contests.

According to research, travel incentives produce higher ROI than any other non-cash rewards.

Extra paid time off

With the hard work of reaching goals and hitting the target, rewarding them with paid time off away from work would be fair.

This will make them have a better work-life balance and realize more important things aside from working. 

Recognition

According to Forbes, "Recognition is one of the most powerful motivators in the world."

That's why we often come across the "employee of the month "reward system. Yes, people love to be recognized. 

According to another study, about 44% of sales reps aren't satisfied with the recognition they receive from their bosses.

When you give out these rewards, it shows your employees that you value their efforts. This will encourage your sales team to continue working.

Office upgrade 

Everyone working in a traditional office loves working in a suitable working environment. 

Want to appreciate that salesperson that has consistently been delivering positive results?

The best reward would be an office upgrade by creating a unique room or improving the current desk. This will motivate the entire sales team to improve sales in your business. 

Entertainment

Give your sales team a break by entertaining an incentive. When they free their minds from the pressure of working day and night, they become more powerful and focused, hence achieving business goals. 

5. Create Healthy Competition

One of the working tricks in improving employees' performance in your company is creating healthy competition. Usually, an environment without competition is dull. Your sales teams will see everything normal, whether they fail or win their targets. 

You need to create excitement by introducing competition rewarding the best performer. 

Creating such competitions makes your sales team active and productive daily. Also, it will help the poorly performing salesperson to strive to be among the best in your company. 

6. Lead, Don't Boss

Besides sitting in the back seat and giving commands, you can do better by being part of your sales team. 

You can take the steering wheel and drive your company to its success. Because your sales team looks up to you, it will also motivate them to work and give support to improve sales. 

Also, when you take part in the sales team strategy, you get a clear picture of why there are some poor results. Therefore, you won't fight the sales team; instead, you will find better ways of offering constructive criticism instead.

7. Show Appreciation

You may view appreciation as being ‌of high value. But here is the truth. Many people find simple words like thank you, keep up, and well done as great motivators. 

It's the same case with your sales team; they don't need a salary increment or more commission to feel appreciated. Just acknowledge their little efforts with powerful words and see them doing even better. These little actions inspire the sales team and will help improve their productivity. 

8. Performance Management

One reason salespeople are unmotivated is that they don't know how they perform. Now, many companies use performance management software to track the performance of their employees and determine the areas that need improvement and motivation.

Let's quickly ‌look at the most popular ones.

Most Popular Sales Performance Management Software

Hubspot Sales CRM

HubSpot is one of the best sales performance management software to manage your sales professionals. You get all the essential functions you need in one place—everything from lead management and marketing automation to CRM integration and email marketing.

You start by creating an account with HubSpot. Then, you add members to your team. Each member has specific roles within the organization. For example, you may have a sales manager who manages other salespeople. Once you've added all your users, you can begin using the app.

Salesforce

Salesforce is another excellent sales team software for small businesses to manage critical sales activities and processes. You can create custom apps, integrate them with your sales CRM system with this platform, and automate aspects of your business through its API. Salesforce provides pretty much every feature you could ever want in an SPM solution. 

Fresh Works

Fresh works is a cloud-based SPM software that offers online and mobile capabilities. Fresh works have over 5 million professionals worldwide. It provides everything you would expect from an effective SPM solution, including forecasting, reporting, and dashboards.

Fresh works CRM integrates calling and emailing and even has some automation options that allow you to schedule emails or sales calls based on specific criteria.

Ambition

Ambition is web-based software for sales team management that helps build relationships with customers and prospects. Ambition makes it easy to keep track of leads, contacts, opportunities, pipeline status, and more. It's an excellent tool for remote sales reps.

Through this, sales leaders can access information about their team and see what needs to be done next. They can also set goals and deadlines for different activities.

Copper

Copper is a simple yet powerful SPM software explicitly designed for sales teams. Copper is a cloud-based application integrated into Gmail so salespeople can view their leads, deals, and activity right inside their inbox.

Troops.ai

Troops AI is a cloud-based sales management platform that helps you organize your sales team and streamline your workflow. Troops AI integrates with your existing CRM, email, calendar, and social media platforms.

It gives you real-time insights into your sales team's productivity. This means you can quickly identify which salesperson is not performing up to par and take action immediately.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a cloud-based CRM sales team software that lets you efficiently manage your entire sales process. Pipedrive is ideal for B2B salespeople because it offers detailed reports and data analysis.

It also has a built-in dashboard that allows you to monitor your performance.

Now, your sales team is performing well, but there is still an obstacle, the COVID-19 pandemic, where salespeople need to work remotely. How do you overcome this challenge?

How to motivate the sales team during COVID-19?

COVID-19 has had a great impact on our business and the sales team. It has made it difficult for the sales team to work under one roof. 

How can you maintain sales team motivation during this pandemic?

Set Attainable Goals

COVID-19 has brought more burden in our daily lives, which means everyone is running up and seeking a way to get back on track. As a leader, you should be wise and loosen things up for your sales team. 

The best way is to set goals that your sales team will find easily attainable. By doing so, they feel relaxed and work to ensure they hit the tiny target. Also, motivation can come once they know they have an understanding boss. 

Stay Plugged in

Since they do everything remotely, your sales team would want a leader's guide on what they do. As a manager, you must be close to ensure no question is unanswered. 

Have Fewer Meetings and More Breaks

Working from home is challenging compared to an office. COVID-19 forced the sales team to mix their family interaction with official work, making it difficult to have a clear schedule. 

Having fewer meetings and more breaks are grand strategies to motivate your sales team.

You should avoid mounting pressure on them and give different meeting hours to favor everyone. 

Also, you can hold the meeting for a short period to avoid such inconveniences. This will enable your sales to attend every meeting, hence, be composed for everything will run well. 

Communicate Setbacks Proactively

When your sales team works separately, chances are they might start missing their quota. Sucking them will add more stress and tension to the remaining salespersons during this pandemic. 

To avoid this, always communicate setbacks early enough if your sales teams are heading in the wrong direction. This will open their minds and help them get back to their feet. They will also find the motivation to work and ensure new sales strategies are underway.

Final Note

Every sales team comprises individuals with distinct personalities and objectives; therefore, no two are exact. Motivational strategies that work for one team might not work for another.

Fortunately, you may explore many low-cost solutions; all you need is the correct mindset, effort, and understanding from your sales staff.

Listen to your salespeople and figure out which motivational tools they like. Talk to us today to explore market automation tools to help your team stay motivated.