Motivating your sales team is just one aspect of the job of a sales manager, but it is all encompassing in that it also includes all of the other things that you do as a sales manager. Sales managers are not only coaching and leading, but there should also be an undercurrent of motivation in everything and anything that you do. And be acutely aware that every interaction that you have and every message that you send has to have an undercurrent of motivation associated with it in order to keep your sales people at peak performance, especially in today’s economy when sales are tougher to get, it is very important to have a highly motivated sales team to push you towards your goals as a sales manager and towards the goals of the organization.
In previous episodes we talked about sales motivation and
As well as achieve the career success that you desire.
On one of our previous shows we talked about the 7 Forces of Motivation which are universal concepts that we tailored for sales people. These motivational forces are forces that are driving your sales people, whether they know it or not, the forces come from their genetic makeup and are the same forces that drove them as kids, then into adulthood, and now as people that are on your team.
The real secret behind all of this is that when you break it all down from a motivational standpoint we need to remember, before we formulate our specific strategy on how to motivate them, we need to understand two concepts of motivations.
Motivation is broken down into 2 types
• Intrinsic
• Extrinsic
Intrinsic motivation is motivation that is driven by an interest or an enjoyment in the task itself. It exists within the individual person rather that relying on any external pressure.
For example, an intrinsic motivation for someone is that which the person finds enjoyable unto itself. Reading a book, or exercising, or the art of selling, or prospecting the task itself is the motivator because they find that enjoyable and pleasurable. Maybe they find it ethical as well, it makes them feels good and is consistent with their personality type.
Intrinsic motivations are deep within the 7 Forces of Motivation that drive people toward the achievement of an objective.
Maybe this might include a sense of achievement, or responsibility, or internal job satisfaction, ownership, or mastery of a thing that they do.
For your sales people, these are internal drivers that you as a sales manager cannot put there, those intrinsic motivations are either there, or they are not.
What you as a sales manager can affect are the external or extrinsic motivators.
That is what we are going to talk about in our motivational strategies: How to motivate them based on their personality types.
Extrinsic motivators are external, from outside the individual. And they are what you as a sales manager can control and change. Extrinsic motivators could be bonus plans, stock options, time off, promotion, praise, threat of punishments, appreciation, acknowledgement, or competitions, prizes, and awards. These are things that you as a sales manager can affect.
It comes down these two individual types of motivation: intrinsic versus extrinsic.
As a sales manager you can most affect the extrinsic motivations which then can feed into the intrinsic motivations.
We will get into specific extrinsic techniques that you can use based upon your sales reps individual profile so that you can affect their sales performance in a positive way.
Making this distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is important because now we are going to give you some extrinsic ways that you can affect and impact the intrinsic motivations of your sales people. It is a very important concept to understand, you are not putting intrinsic motivators there in the first place, that is part of their specific profile, but you can affect the intrinsic motivations through your actions, and your actions are extrinsic motivators.
Each sales rep should have a different motivational strategy or profile that you create so that you can apply extrinsic motivators to impact their intrinsic motivation.
It is important to remember that you are the one that is going to apply the extrinsic motivation to affect the intrinsic motivations of your sales people.
How do you do that?
You cannot look at each one of your sales people as the same. They each have a different motivational profile. Some people are motivated by one thing more than another. Most upper executives and think, “if we just put a good commission plan together and we just put a good pay plan in place, then everything is going to be fine.”
That does have something to do with it, but money isn’t a sole motivator for your sales people. It is what that money means.
By painting with a broad brush, and trying to motivate them all in the same way, you really end up missing the mark, and not being as effective as you could be if you had an individual motivational strategy for each one of the people
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