How To Motivate Successful Salespeople
The key motivators of successful salespeople are often asked about by managers attending management training courses. If these can better understand, they will be more effective at managing these successful people.
Personal success clearly comes before team performance
Top salespeople are rare. What really distinguishes them from others? Over a period of 22 years the Gallup Management Consulting Group have carried out studies which reveale the following key abilities and talents:
Attribute 1: Concluding sales negotiations
The ability to conclude sales negotiations successfully is principally the result of an amazing amount of persistence. Top salespeople do not allow themselves to be discouraged by failure. They accept that double the amount of sales negotiations means double the amount of failure.
They put up with the inevitable number of unsuccessful visits, because they have absolute faith in themselves and the product and services that they are selling.
Attribute 2: Self motivation
The reasons for top salespeople wanting to get to the top are as different as the people themselves: money; recognition; getting to know people; the desire to prove themselves; etc. The one thing they have in common, however, is that there is a fire burning in them. It is not the sales manager who has lit this fire, but it is he who controls the amount of air that fans the fire and makes sure that it is not extinguished.
This inner motivation is stronger than any motivation package a sales manager can introduce and makes it possible for top salespeople to achieve excellent performances.
Attribute 3: Self discipline
Clients are demanding and there is tough competition. Against this background, sustainable, long-term success is only conceivable if salespeople work in the most organised way possible.
Reliability, meeting deadlines and diligence are the cornerstones of a top salesperson's working style. They have tailor-made many of the aids they have to help them accomplish this: forms, lists, deadline overviews, presentation portfolios.
Attribute 4: Empathy
Offensive salespeople and power sellers are indisputably successful in certain markets. In general, however, salespeople need to build up and nurture a relationship with the client. This always entails looking at the situation from the client's point of view and a good understanding of the client's problems. A salesperson will only have the patience to do this if they accept the client and emphasise the things that both of them have in common.
If you have a top salesperson like this in your sales team, then it is your job to make sure that they keep their "inner" motivation as taught on all good management training courses. What is the driving force that motivates them? Four "motivational factors" and the effect these have on a sales team are mentioned in the Gallup Study:
Competition
Salespeople who are motivated by competition do not only want to win, they want to be better than their competitors. The result is they make no distinction between a sales person from a rival company and a co-worker. They are fair, however, and their performance will also inspire their sales team.
Ego drive
The ego of these top salespeople is the focal point of everything. They want to be the best and get the glory personally. Team performance means nothing to them. You can however motivate these salespeople by making them mentors for young salespeople. They are exhilarated when younger salespeople admire their expertise.
Love of success
This is the motivation that is most desirable to drum into team thinking, but unfortunately team thoughts rarely enter the head of top salespeople. Any salesperson who loves success feels motivated by the task at hand alone. If they achieve a goal, their sights are automatically set a notch higher. Colleagues' success does not bother them, since the main thing is that the task has been accomplished. Always ensure there are enough challenges to stretch your salespeople.
Service strength
The strength of salespeople who have this inner motivation is the ability to create and build on client relationships. They are constantly on the look-out for the optimum uses for their clients. These are the ones who express with as much understanding as possible what it is the customer actually needs and then goes out of their way to accomplish this. In the sales team, this type of salesperson is often the work horse who does the less well-liked tasks, because these are the ones which are complicated and drawn out. You need to recognise the fact that your top salespeople fulfil this role.
These are the key motivators and attributes of successful sales people. Managers who hope to further develop their skills of motivating and identifying successful salespeople can attend pertinent management training courses.
