How to ACTUALLY Motivate Your Team
The world has faced a devastating global pandemic that has brought mental health to an all-time low. It’s been well-documented how individuals are suffering a lack of motivation and productivity amid such challenges. This has led to a surge in articles and other resources with advice on how to help yourself out of this motivational slump.
However, there aren’t nearly as many guides that detail how those in leadership positions can help their team with this struggle. This is an important discussion that needs to be had because, as a manager or leader of a team of people, you can make a significant impact on the mental health of your employees.
This leads to the question: how do I help motivate my employees? What can I do as a team leader to improve employee engagement and spark productivity?
One thing is for certain: you won’t get them motivated with financial numbers.
Why numbers don’t work
As stated in a recent post from the Harvard Business Review, a focus on achieving a financial goal for the company won’t be enough to get your sales team reinvigorated in their work. Placing a sole emphasis on meeting a financial target “erodes morale and undermines long-term strategy.” A successful long-term strategy requires an engaged workforce.
Consider this: when you talk about numbers and financial goals alone, the feeling becomes strictly transactional. This transactional approach spreads from the leader to the employee, and from the employee to the customer or prospect. Building trust is crucial for brands right now, and a transactional approach is not the way to build that trust.
It’s important to recognize that the way your employees feel about their company (and for salespeople in particular, the product they’re selling) drives their behavior.
If your sales team is only focused on spreadsheets and numbers, how can you expect them to feel very engaged and motivated to succeed?
Motivating employees
Motivation is a key factor in success, especially now. In fact, at Ascent Cloud, we’ve talked to companies who report that they are keeping an eye on and tracking motivation levels more now than ever before. It is crucial that you are keeping your team engaged and motivated to ensure that everyone is doing their best work.
Financial targets are not a driver of employee performance, they are merely an outcome or result of the work of your sales team. To really make a difference, you have to focus on things that truly drive a change in behavior, such as engagement and motivation.
The following are a couple quick tips and tricks to help engage and motivate your sales team.
1. Invest in gamification
Get your employees excited about their quarterly goals by encouraging friendly competition and celebrating success.
The best way to motivate employees (beyond compensation) is through competition and recognition. Activities like contests, leaderboards, and other sales motivators help get employees engaged by promoting positive competitions among teammates and recognizing and celebrating success. Gamification also helps build a culture of accountability and reinforces the key behaviors that drive performance.
While there are some DIY options out there (like Ascent Cloud’s free sales contest templates), the last thing you want to do is create too much stress for yourself while trying to help motivate your team members. There are plenty of solutions available on AppExchange that automate your gamification so you don’t have to sacrifice your own time to set up (and continuously update) contests and leaderboards from scratch.
2. Give your sales team a purpose
Make sure your employees understand the why behind what they’re being asked to do. If they can connect the goals to a larger picture, they’ll be much more engaged and motivated to succeed.
The conversation shouldn’t stop at “here are the numbers we expect you to achieve.” Instead, the emphasis must be on the purpose behind the numbers.
Taking the time to ensure your team understands how their work fits into the larger scheme of things will help boost engagement and improve performance. It can also help an employee feel a sense of pride and ownership, knowing that there is a purpose or significance behind what they do on a daily basis.
3. Bring emotion into it
One of the best pieces of advice from the Harvard Business Review article is to “discuss individual customers with emotion and specificity.” Emotions are a strong motivator, and if you can get your team to feel this emotional connection to customers, they’ll be more likely to go above and beyond for them — leading to happier and more loyal customers.
In a study conducted by experts from the University of Michigan, employees at a call center were tasked with soliciting donations from alumni to contribute to scholarships for incoming students. The group was split in two, and one group met with a scholarship recipient for a short conversation before they began their daily work. The control group did not.
In the end, the group who had the opportunity to forge this emotional tie to the human being who benefited from the work they did were significantly more successful than their teammates who did not.
This same principle can be applied to your own team: if you speak about customers on an individual & human level, it creates more of an emotional pull that is a strong motivator.
This connection is helpful in other ways, too. Currently, buyers have less tolerance for sellers that don’t have empathy or a personal touch. In fact, at a recent LinkedIn Sales Solutions event, Spark, it was revealed that over 90% of C-suite do not respond to any cold emails. If your sales team is simply going through the motions (a common occurrence when employees feel a lack of motivation) and aren’t engaged, they won’t have success.
Conclusion
It’s no longer just about what you sell, it should be about how you can help. The same idea should be applied to your interactions with staff: focus on how you can help them, rather than focusing only on making the numbers.
This human-centered approach demonstrates the empathy that is critical to relationship building between you and your employees, as well as between your employees and their customers.
Check out apps that can help you motivate your sales team on AppExchange.
