Motivate Your Sales Team

TURN UP THE HEAT

Ask yourself, “what incentives can I structure this week in order to reward specific behaviors in my team that will achieve our current goals? Maybe you’re thinking, we're starting to get real sloppy with how much revenue we're bringing in per job. Start offering rewards for jobs that hit X profitability on overall revenue.

How about canvassing incentives? Okay, Let’s say you've noticed that one of your reps is only knocking 20 doors a day, which is pitiful, right? If that's the case, incentivize the right behavior with positive reinforcement. Tell your team, ”hey, you need to knock at least this much today, and anyone who does it will get this. Or let’s say you want an early start to each day. Well, how do you incentivize that behavior? Most of your door knockers are probably going to be 1099 and so, it can be difficult to control how hard they work. All the best behaviors where you would just love to say, “you have to do this,” are not always going to happen when they’re 1099. Fortunately, you can control their bonuses, incentives, competitions, and prizes. These are the things you must use to motivate your team.

Now, if you're not doing this already, you’ve probably noticed that it has been really difficult for you to hold them to anything because you have no leverage. Right? Does this make sense? Once you start offering reinforcement incentives, make sure you are intentional with it. One that's very easy that a lot of people do is a first-blood incentive. First contingency or first inspection on the doors today gets lunch paid for with a $15 gift card to Subway or something like that. Okay, but then you don't want someone to just show up and get it on the first door. You want them to be on the doors by a certain time, right? So, tell them, “in order to qualify for this incentive, text me a picture of you on the door at 10:30.” If the text comes in at 10:31, “sorry, you don't qualify for the incentive for today.” This is how you will get them to be on time. By putting these little parameters in place, you will start to shape things like:

1. When are my people showing up on the doors?
2. How engaged are they on the doors? 
3. How incentivized are they to have the right behavior on the door?
4. How to push for the good jobs as much as possible?

Does this make sense? And again, this is superficial. This advice is just scratching the surface.

FREE ENERGY

There is a vat of free energy for all of your sales reps day in and day out that you can tap into. When you leverage them against each other, that is free energy. And, it costs you almost nothing. Sometimes, you don't even have to do any prize. When you put pride on the line and you make it smart and fun, your people will sell lights out! You're like, “let me get this straight. You're not motivated to get after it in order to pay your electricity bill. But, to beat homey, you're gonna go work until midnight tonight?” I don't totally get that but hey, we're going to leverage this tool for our mutual benefit. It's going to be a win-win.

PROVIDE BETTER DEVELOPMENT PATHS

Progress equals happiness. You are all here today at this conference because you want progress. You spent money, time, and energy to be here today. This is what you want. You want growth. You want more revenue. You want to be able to hire more people and impact more lives. Whatever the application is, you want to progress. Progress is a must for happiness. People who are stationary, who are stagnant in their lives, are not actually happy. They are not fulfilled. They may experience temporary flashes of happiness, good moods, and good days; but that enduring, meaningful, tried and true happiness comes through progress every single time. If you think about one of the most stagnant points in your life, it was probably one of the stillest and slowest moments in your life as well. So, I'm not trying to get too heavy here but I want you to understand. You're all here for a really amazing thing. And, if you apply yourself, that will bring you and yours a lot of new and renewed happiness. I'm very excited about that.

Now imagine, your reps want the exact same thing. They want that too. They want to progress. This can be tricky when there is a commission structure. And so we say to our reps, “well, you know, the more you sell, the more money you're going to make.” But at a certain point, some of your slingers, your most talented people will have hit their ceiling. No matter how good they are and how proficient they are in managing their day, referrals, and the process, there is still only one of them. So there's a relative ceiling that each person is going to hit if they haven't already.

START THE TIMER

Now, what do you offer that person? Have you been able to come up with anything new? Because if they see no path to more progress, then they are not going to be interested. The second they hit that relative plateau, start the timer. You probably have two, maybe three years if you have a really good relationship. I'm sure there are outliers or experiences that defy this but eventually, they are going to look for something else.

IT'S NOT ABOUT MONEY

Guess what? It's not going to have to do with money. It's not going to be about money. It's going to be about opportunity because yes, we all want to make a lot more money but the reality is that they want to feel progress on a personal, developmental level. Please! I'm telling you, out of everything discussed so far in this session, this is the most important by a landslide, a landslide. This is how you get your reps to outperform everybody else. When I say, Quit Playing for Second, this is the key. You need to make sure that your reps totally believe in your company because they are going to show out every single day if they see a long-term plan that makes sense for them. You will lose that person if they have no excitement about upward mobility or advancement opportunities at your company. You will lose them.

A PATH TO LEADERSHIP

In your company, where is the opportunity for advancement and professional growth? Are you opening up a new branch, expanding, hiring managers? Can you promote from within? Maybe you’ve talked about equity or profit sharing. There needs to be something out there, something for your team to strive for, more than just, “hey, I'm going to cap out of my personal earnings.” I hope that this principle sticks heavy with you. Share the wealth. Share the happiness potential that professional growth and development brings.

WATCH THE VIDEO PRESENTATION

This article is an excerpt, Part 5 from the live presentation with Jake Bennington at Win the Storm 2021. Watch the full presentation by clicking on the button below.

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