Sales training skills, motivating your sales team

SALES TRAINING SKILLS, MOTIVATING YOUR SALES TEAM

Sales training skills, motivating your sales team, why the best sales people are self-motivated and training courses are a waste of money.

I should say that I am amazed by the number of companies who waste their money on sending their sales people on sales training courses to learn selling skills but I am not. I have worked with enough managing directors who, under pressure and desperate to increase sales succumb to the hype that sales training companies expound.

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I have yet to meet an MD who, 12 months later, genuinely felt that their money had been well spent. And that is saying something because most managing directors hate to admit they made a mistake.

Sales training courses are only as good as the sales trainees, in the same way as a sales lead is only as good as the salesperson. Sales success is determined by your selection and recruitment process. If you have quality sales personnel, they don't need a lot of training, all they need is a continuous flow of qualified leads and appointments.

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Too many companies get sucked into believing that a sales training company can somehow turn their poor calibre sales team into a bunch of hot shots. If there is room to improve sales it will be within the control of the directors of the company to improve moral, improve products, make them more competitive and provide quality sales leads.

MOTIVATING YOUR SALES TEAM

All a sales training course will do is provide short term motivation to sales people who are easily swayed and convinced by clever rhetoric and sound bites that stimulate the thought processes. Successful, experienced sales people will see through this and be irritated by the fact that they are most likely being lectured to by ex-sales people who couldn't last the course.

Sales people who are easily swayed by clever rhetoric and sound bites are going to be easily swayed in every area of their life. They may leave the training course feeling motivated but it will not last. The first rebuff or disappointment will wipe the motivation off their mind very quickly.

Good quality sales people are already:

Self-motivated
Ambitious
Determined
Courageous
Persistent
Greedy
Confident
Competitive
Positive

You would be far better off feeding the living than trying to breathe life into the dead. In other words, finding ways of getting more out of a small nucleus of high performers than trying to motivate a large number of low achievers.

The 80-20 rule applies here. I bet if you look at your sales figures, something like 80% of your business is most likely coming from 20% of your sales team. If this is indeed the case, your sales managers are spinning plates. They are running around trying to motivate a number of people and by the time they get to the last one, the first is starting to wobble again and the whole process has to start again. The fault is in the selection and recruitment process.

I always look around at sales trainees on training courses and come to the conclusion that they shouldn't even be in sales and at some point in the near future they will be moving on. This means that all the money spent on recruitment and training will have been wasted. This is neither productive nor profitable.

So how and why do you motivate a sales team of quality sales people who are already self-motivated?

In my experience, successful sales people are motivated by:

More money
Competitions
Winning
Recognition

In my time have won cars (Jaguar and Mercedes sports), holidays and convention places (Bali, Florida, New York, Singapore, Hong Kong, Cruise round the Greek islands, to name just a few), more or less been able to furnish my house, plus numerous other competition prizes too numerous to mention.

These sales competitions were financed not by the extra sales I made but by the losers of the sales competitions I won and I lost more than I won. However, it was my belief and the belief of all the other sales people who believed they could win that motivated us to bleed even more than normal in our pursuit of success.

Competitions only further motivate those sales people who are already motivated and prepared to pay the price of success. Whilst we were participating, we were making even more commission which was a stimulant in itself but winning and the recognition were a major motivation.

Of the thousands of sales people who participated, most would have lost interest within the first couple of months having realised they weren't going to win or qualify, a few hundred would have continued to strive for a few months and less than a hundred would have kept going for the length of the competition because they retained their belief in themselves.

However, the increase in sales across the board would have paid for the cars or holidays a thousand fold because these competitions and qualifying for a convention took place over one and two year periods. It was amazing how much extra business was done in the final months as salesmen and women pulled the stops out to win or qualify.

But what of the also rans and general no hopers who knew from the start that they had no chance of winning?

As a sales manager, I used to run in house sales competitions by pairing off equally talented sales people who would bet each other a bottle of scotch or gin as to who would do the most sales in a month. These competitions generated additional sales and were successful for a number of reasons:

They cost me nothing because I didn't have to pay for the prizes
Even the least self-motivated sales people would work harder; not because they wanted to win a bottle of spirits but because they didn't want to have to pay for a bottle for the winner
They were competitions they thought they had a chance of winning

From time to time I would vary the competition by having a bet with each sales person as to how many sales they would make in a month. This worked particularly well because they hated buying me a bottle even more than they hated buying one for a colleague and if I worked it well, would normally end up with a surplus of bottles, so never actually had to buy any myself.

It's amazing how a salesman will go to extremes to win anything if they feel it's within their grasp and these competitions added an element of fun and competitiveness to the daily tasks let alone the extra commission they earned.

Successful sales people are competitive and winning is everything and a competition that is managed correctly and costs little or nothing can generate far more sales than any sales training course.