WillSell4Commish

VP of Deez

Best way to motivate your sales team?!

I have 15 reps that will be selling with me this Summer. Personally, incentives such as shoes or airpods don't do it for me. My motivation stems from wanting to succeed in the D2D industry so I can get a position in tech and have continued success. For most guys, this is not the case.

What are some strategies for motivating reps to keep hitting it hard even in down times?

🧢 Sales Management

😎 Sales Skills

17 comments

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HarryCaray

Notable Contributor

HMFIC

pay them

Flippinghubs

Opinionated

Account Executive

best answer

BlueJays2591

Politicker

Federal Business Dev Director

Money. If they're not motivated by money, why are they in sales? Monthly competitions with cash bonuses involved usually works quite well.

wonk

Politicker

Business Development Manager

Apart from money, find out what drives each individual sales person.

You said you want to succeed in the D2D industry so you can get into tech.
Find out what the sales people want to achieve & you'll be able to motivate them much more. For some it's family, for some it's their expensive hobbies, just remind them and find a way to help them get there.

WillSell4Commish

Opinionated

VP of Deez

Having everyone start the Summer with posting their "why" on the wall is one idea I had. Being able to extrapolate their whys and have 1on1's about their true motivation would be a great move to find what drives them. Thanks!

CuriousFox

WR Officer

🦊

Staying employed is a pretty good one 🤷‍♀️

salesninja

Opinionated

cash always does the trick...we do team goals and each rep receives a bonus based on your contribution percentage to the overall number

in other words, if the team bonus is $20k and rep A contributed 50% of the overall sales, then his/her bonus would be $10k

exec

Acclaimed Answer

Account Executive

SPIFFS

WillSell4Commish

Opinionated

VP of Deez

I'm ignorant to what a spiff is, could you elaborate?

exec

Acclaimed Answer

Account Executive

a spif is basically an extra incentive to support improvements in specific areas. so if you want reps to prospect more, you can put a $$$ spif to whoever has the most meetings by the end of quarter. or if you want more opportunities created, $$$ to number of opps and so on. I found this cool article on it if you want to learn more - I guess it's SPIF not SPIFF haha, my mistake https://www.xactlycorp.com/blog/spif-definition-sales-performance-incentive-fund

WillSell4Commish

Opinionated

VP of Deez

Gotcha, thanks for expanding. That sounds like a great idea

Tres_Comas

Politicker

Account Executive

Money

Captain_Q

Arsonist

Sr. Account Executive

1. Amazon or Visa gift cards are always nice, then they can do whatever they want with them.

2. Anytime we hit our monthly team number we get a happy hour. Any month we all hit, we get a "kick-ass party" which is basically all take a half-day and find some fun activity to go do. Plus it builds relationships amongst the team.

3. Money

JDialz

Politicker

Chief Operating Officer

MONEY!

But really, everyone in my group is highly competitive. "Social pressure" works great for us. What I mean by that is this: 1) public postings of progress in a highly visible area on a white board, or some other similar means. 2) We take awesome trips, but the caveat is that either everyone gets to go, or nobody gets to go. Set a high, but attainable, bar that everyone has to hit as individuals in order to get to go. If somebody seems to be falling behind, the smart ones will altruistically (however fake it may be) find ways to help the bottom third producers step it up.

Hope this is helpful! It may seem kinda ticky-tack, but it works for us.

Don_Ready

Politicker

Besides the obvious answer of money; leading from the front always helps.

CuriousFox

WR Officer

🦊

Money.

spaceman

Contributor

Sales

A couple unique ideas I've seen/that have worked on me:

- Making the road ahead a little easier if they perform now. For example, if you hit your stretch goal this month, you'll start next month at 10% of quota or something like that.

- You can set up streaks i.e. if you hit certain activity metrics week over week, you can earn perks (maybe it's distribution of a certain type of lead, recognition in company meetings, or again quota accelerators like above) that again make the road ahead a little easier.

The toughest part of sales is that every single month/quarter/year the clock resets. "You did good last month? Nice. Now hit your number again this month or you're on a PIP".

It's exhausting.

So if you can reward consistency by greasing the wheel a little bit for the next sales period, I think that's interesting for a lot of us.