There’s no denying that happy employees make the best employees. Statistics show that productivity increases by up to 37% in employees that feel satisfied in their jobs, which is significant when you compare it to the loss of productivity in those that are not satisfied.  As an integral part of a successful business, it’s essential to ensure your sales team are constantly motivated and have goals to work towards, yet the nature of sales can sometimes get the team down. Knowing how to set both monetised and non-monetised incentives is therefore essential in ensuring the on-going effectiveness of a sales team.

Below we’ll look at four of the most effective ways to ensure your sales team remain motivated.

Don’t make it all about the results

This first top strategy may have you scratching your head as sales is one of – if not the most – demanding careers when it comes to delivering results and, as a Sales Manager, you expect results. Yet focusing on the results alone could put undue stress on your team and cause them to lose focus on their end goal when things don’t seem to be going their way.

Instead, drive your team to have a full pipeline of opportunities, a busy calendar of scheduled calls and meetings, and an optimistic but not unrealistic monthly target. Your team should be focusing on key sales actions such as updating CRM activity, qualifying inbound leads, cold calls and email activity, amongst other key tasks in order to measure the efforts they have put in. This will not only enable you to identify sales individuals’ efforts even when things don’t work out, it will empower your team to analyse how their input is directly affecting their output.

Helping your sales team structure and plan their time along with reasonable targets can help motivate them.

Work hard but play hard too

The nature of a sales person’s job can mean that there’s never a definitive start or end time. Your team members may find themselves taking calls at the crack of dawn or working on a proposal for a key client at 11pm at night – that’s just the way it goes. However, as eager as your team may be to put in the extra effort, do remind them that it’s important to play hard too.

Some of the best ways to do this include, arranging after-work meet ups for drinks or even a weekend game of group sports to bring out their competitive side. In addition, socialisation during work hours can be an effective way to keep up morale if executed correctly. This can be done by providing methods for group communications, with the likes of WhatsApp or Tandem.chat.

Invest in tools for your team

Working in sales means long days and often long evenings too. To ensure your sales team remain motivated and don’t become overworked, it may be necessary to implement a certain level of automation for sales support tasks, in order to free up some of your team’s time. Tools such as Lusha add-on for LinkedIn enables your team to focus on what’s most important – communicating effectively and directly with the right people. The tool cuts out some of the legwork by identifying and collecting direct contact details of potential key contacts to help utilise the time of salespeople efficiently.

In recent times where people are bombarded by frequent sales and marketing emails, ads and messages, it can be difficult to get a key contact’s attention. Therefore by connecting with a contact directly through LinkedIn and gaining contact details, your team will stand much more of a chance at being successful in converting a lead, thus raising their levels of motivation.

Investing in tools and supplies that will benefit your sales team can help increase motivation.

Ensuring you have your team’s respect

Without the respect of your sales team, motivating them could be a challenge. As a Sales Team Leader or Manager, you have a duty to ensure the wellbeing of your team at work, by creating the ground rules for what is and isn’t acceptable. In addition, ensuring you empower your team to learn and give constructive feedback is also an effective way of gaining their respect.

As important as it is for your team to respect you, it works both ways. Make sure to show your team that you respect them in order to encourage a positive synergy within the sales team.

Overall, ensuring your sales team stays motivated will undoubtedly have a positive effect on your team’s ability to hit targets. It’s not an easy job and, in a lot of cases, will require some sort of financial investment. However the benefits created by treating your team well can often outweigh the initial cost of investment.