5 Ways To Get Your Sales Team Motivated

I just returned from a family vacation in Bali which I visited for the first time in my life. I was somewhat apprehensive about visiting Bali with wife and 3 young kids as I’d heard many “horror” stories of bad experiences that seem to get the attention of the media.

To my delight we had the best family holiday ever, largely due to the amazing attitudes and friendliness of the Balinese people in the resort and everywhere we travelled across Bali. The staff specifically at the resort we stayed in Nusa Dua had a helpful and attentive passion for their job which created a contagious culture which is rare to find in Australia.

And they must be motivated by more than just money, as the minimum wage in Bali is just over $180/month AUD!

It got me thinking… Why in dealerships in 2016 do I often hear that management are struggling to motivate their sales team in order to increase their performance? That people just aren’t hungry or driven to do anything more than just enough...

With new car profitability in 2016 on the decline and a hyper-competitive market, we can’t afford to have any sales team struggling for motivation, and therefore we must be proactive to manage our sales teams differently.

So here are 5 ways you can get your sales team more motivated to do more than just enough.

1. Hire Motivated People
The reality is you can’t motivate people who aren’t self-motivated, instead you must hire self-motivated people, and then continue to inspire them to get the best out of themselves.

Whilst good help is hard to find, this doesn’t give us an excuse for hiring the best of a bad bunch only to complain that they aren’t motivated once they finish their probation. The hiring process is so important to find out what motivates and inspires the person you are looking to hire.

2. Expect Initiative 
As a key performance indicator, I always recommend to the dealers to measure more than just the number of sales, gross profit, and CSI. If you are going to expect initiative, then you have to expect your sales team to be regularly coming to you in management with new ideas, to be regularly prospecting, and to be creating business on their own, not just waiting for the door to swing or the phone to ring.

I would also recommend paying an additional bonus for sales that are won from prospecting, repeat and referral or other initiatives.

3. Don’t Allow Negativity 
I’m a big believer that if you are going to create a culture of motivation in your sales team, you must have a zero tolerance for the opposite. Negativity is the cancer that will kill motivation in your dealership.

A good friend of mine runs a business in the United States. He has a no negativity policy in his company where if someone is caught more than once being negative without giving a solution to the problem, they no longer have a position at his company. Tough but absolutely necessary!

4. Stop Running “Beat Up” Meetings
Your morning meetings are the place your team will either find their motivation or have it instantly smashed.  Many dealerships have a morning sales meeting to run through yesterday’s results and smash the team if it didn’t perform. That’s crazy!

Instead of going through the numbers, you must run a “Jump Start Meeting” that motivates and trains the team for the day ahead. In this meeting you will role play, discuss and handle customer objections, product news and quiz, share good performance stories and offer assistance to your team with leads.

5. Understand Your Staff’s Motivation
It’s hard to get your sales team motivated when you don’t know what motivates each individual. Could you tell me what the greatest motivator is to each member of your sales team? Is it spending time with their family, buying a new house, going on a holiday, having a weekend off, being a the number 1 performer, being offered a promotion??? Leadership expert John Maxwell says, “Leadership is influence”, and if you want to have influence with your team, you must know what makes them tick in order to remind them of their motivations when times get tough...

I hope you can implement these 5 techniques and get ready for a more motivated and high performing sales team.

I look forward to your feedback on this article by emailing me at dave@davebenson247.com

Great selling!

Dave Benson

10 Things To Stop You Getting "Sales Sick"

This past week I’ve had my nephew from Melbourne staying with us while he is on university holidays. He is in his second year on the way to becoming a doctor, but unfortunately all his studies so far couldn’t prevent him from getting food poisoning last night! (Must have been my cooking!)

Absolutely no one likes getting sick. But when you do get sick, thank goodness there are doctors and hospitals on call to help get us back on out feet again. 

The problem with most remedies though is they are treatments, not preventative from future sickness. Many of us don’t do enough with our diets and lifestyles in order to prevent sickness and build a healthy immune system and then have to opt for antibiotics when we do get sick.

So how do we build a healthy sales immune system to prevent ourselves from getting sales sick?

Well, let me first define what sales sick is...

Sales sick is when you know how to sell, you’ve been successful before, but regardless of what you do right now, nothing seems to be working!

It’s like you’re stuck in a sales rut. We’ve all been there… But how do we get out of it, or more to the point, how do we prevent it from happening?

From my 16 years in sales, I’ve noticed and observed 100’s of these situations and they all have 1 thing in common. 

When you’re in a selling rut, your mindset is down the drain…

Your attitude, thought patterns and focus are all over the places, and it shows in your frustration levels and sales numbers. You start to take shortcuts, be too eager to close, and not build rapport with your clients like you normally do.

I absolutely believe your number 1 ingredient for preventing sales sickness is maintaining a healthy mindset.

In order to maintain a healthy mindset, you must take preventative measures to ensure regardless of circumstances, you keep your cool, focus on the disciplines of following the process, prospecting, asking for referrals, setting appointments, asking for the sale, having disciplined follow up and much more.

Keeping your cool is at the top of the list.

In sales, we are dealing with people all day long. Because we are dealing with emotional creatures, we cannot totally prevent tension, anger, or stop annoying people from enquiring, but we do need to know how to best deal with it.

So here are 10 mindset tips to help you keep your cool in all selling situations.

1/ Realise 1 in 10 people are going to be hard to get along with. 

2/ 94% of things you worry about, you can’t control. So don’t worry be happy!

3/ Sales is all about compromise and negotiating for a win win, not a lose lose. You don’t have to be right and have the last say

4/ Get 8 hours sleep every night. If you want to win in sales, get your sleep

5/ Keep a healthy diet with plenty of water

6/ Stay consistent on your daily disciplines of prospecting, following up and key selling activities

7/ Follow the sales process and don’t take short cuts

8/ Stay away from negative people

9/ Don’t look at the sales board, instead look at your daily activities

10/ Focus on building relationships and following the process, not on the sale. The results will come

I’ve seen too many sales people choose to opt for another career because they get burnt out as a salesperson due to sales sickness. Don’t be one of them, instead stay strong and keep selling hard!