Struggling to Motivate Your Sales Team? You’re Probably Overlooking This

Editor’s note: This is the second post in a three-part series on sales motivation. The first post focused on the importance of building competition into your sales team’s everyday activities, and the third post will explore the affect team success can have on motivation.

When I sold for IBM in the late ’80s and early ’90s, I baffled sales managers. The reason? I never worried about commissions or bonuses.

I knew that if I performed at the level I was capable of, money would come. So, when my management team pushed me to add new accounts or drive new revenue, many of the traditional motivation techniques they relied on weren’t effective. Sure, the potential of earning extra money was nice, but it didn’t lead me to perform differently.

What did drive me was a powerful, but often ignored, sales motivator: Recognition.

More than money or tangible rewards, I thrived on praise. Whether it came at an annual meeting for ranking it the top 1 percent of sales reps worldwide, or through a “Sales Rep of the Month” award at a sales meeting, I was fueled by acknowledgement that I’d done a good job, or validation that I’d achieved (or exceeded) key goals.

Unfortunately for sales managers, salespeople like me are often the most challenging team members to motivate. They’re hard to identify, and even if you do manage to recognize them, they’re not always easy to read. They defy all stereotypes and go against every motivation technique most sales managers are trained to use.

When you do identify recognition-driven sales reps, you need to know which levers to pull to get the most out of them. Here are just a few suggestions to help you do that:

• Praise them: This can be as simple as sending an email to let them know they’re doing a great job, or as involved as setting up a meeting with a key executive to demonstrate how much you value their effort. Regardless, those types of gestures can have a big impact on reps who thrive on recognition.
• Invent awards: Maybe it’s “Top Sales Dog of the Month,” or “Master Prospector of the Quarter,” but the idea is to come up with fun titles that reps can hang their hats on.
• Invite reps to coach new hires: This might seem like something most sales reps would hate, but for recognition-driven reps it actually validates that you trust and believe in them.
• Ask reps to share their secrets: If a sales rep is a particularly good prospector or closer, encourage that rep to give a presentation or host a training session on whatever he or she does well. Doing this not only will acknowledge a job well done, it also will allow everyone else on your team to learn from that rep’s expertise.
• Promote them: While some successful sales reps might not want to make the leap into sales management, promotion within the sales team can be a powerful motivator. Consider changing a rep’s title to Senior Account Executive, Senior Sales Consultant or Business Development Team Lead and give them more responsibility within the team.

Now, it’s important to qualify those five motivational tactics by saying this: they are not replacements for the financial rewards that every salesperson deserves for doing his or her job well. You still need to deliver commissions, bonuses and raises to those team members when they hit their targets or goals.

The differentiator here is that those financial rewards are expected benefits for recognition-driven reps, not the game-changing motivators that encourage reps to constantly push themselves to new heights.

Kendra Lee is a top IT seller, prospect attraction expert, author of the award winning books “The Sales Magnet” and “Selling Against the Goal” and president of KLA Group. Specializing in the IT industry, KLA Group works with companies to break in and exceed revenue objectives in the Small and Midmarket Business (SMB) segment.