If you’ve just hired a brand new sales team to start pushing your product into the market, chances are you’re going to need to learn how to motivate them as quickly as possible. Beyond just spreading the passion you have for your company, it’s philosophy, and it’s product, you need to inspire your team to go above and beyond their job obligations. Below are important steps every manager should take, especially with a new sales team, to point it in the right direction and generate success.
KNOW YOUR TEAM
First and foremost, to motivate your new sales team, you need to understand them. Get to know each member of your team individually. Learning how each one best takes feedback or criticism can help you lead. Knowing what drives each member can also help you understand the best way to motivate and reward your team. Have your team members take personality tests like this one, or host 1-on-1 conversations centered on how they want to be managed. If you respect and understand your team’s individual members, you will be able to motivate them much more successfully. Using just one method to inspire will most likely leave your team stagnant.
SET GOALS
Goals are great means to motivate your new sales team. Don’t just set long-term goals, set daily, weekly, and monthly goals as well. Achieving success comes from small decisions made daily. Make sure every goal you set for your team includes a plan of action on how to achieve it. Understanding individual metrics and how they work together can help your team know what actions they need to take to ensure they hit quota. Learning how many calls it takes to establishing a lead and the average timeline before a lead becomes a sale can help a sales person plan accordingly. Realistic and stretch goals can empower your team to achieve success in an expected timeline.
ACT AS A RESOURCE
As a manager, your daily job should focus on assisting your team. During your free time, be available for hard or challenging calls with your team members. Holding 1-on-1 meetings weekly to discuss different strategies and evaluate pipelines is integral to a successful team. Being a resource for your team means not taking yourself out of the daily actions that sales require; the best managers remain invested in the working mechanics of the team. Being available for every part of the sales process and leading by example is the best method to motivate your team.
HIGHLIGHT SUCCESS
Lastly, to motivate your team, highlight their successes. Competition is healthy among a sales team, especially when the rest of the team helps celebrate each other’s victories. Make sure your team knows the daily progress individuals make. Using dashboards or countdowns to track goals can help set the right atmosphere of pressure and excitement. So long as your feedback is positive and your team is encouraged, pressure is a healthy way to approach sales goals. For a job that deals with a lot of rejection, you need to offset the negativity with positive reinforcements for great achievements. If you’re helping your team meet their goals month after month, then displaying their progress isn’t off-putting but rather inspiring. You are just as invested in success as they are. Celebrate the victories to breed more victories!