Motivating Salespeople

When managing and motivating salespeople it’s important to understand what their motivating factors are. Understanding what they believe about sales will help you tailor your training and coaching. A salesperson’s goals and values will provide you insight into what motivates them.

Understanding someone beliefs and goals will help you manage toward motivation if you are genuinely interested in supporting the sales person in achieving their goals and helping them strengthen any limiting beliefs.

I’ve found success explaining to the people I am managing how I want truly want to support them in business and personally. I then ask if they would take some time answering these questions so we can discuss over lunch or coffee. Let them complete them in private then discuss together.

Beliefs

• What comes to mind when you hear the word “sales?”
• What type of sales people come to mind when you hear “salesman?”
• What type of sales volume do you believe you can achieve month in and out? (be realistic)
• What about sales comes easy to you?
• What about sales is harder?
• What do you really dislike about sales?

Goals

• Why did you choose this position?
• What do you hope will happen for yourself in this position?
• What things do you hope to acquire?
• What are your career aspirations (short and long term)
• How will this position help you in your long term goals?
• How much income do you want to realize in 2013, 2014 and 2015

Values

• What are the most important things to you in life?
• What types of situations or circumstances motivate you?

Keeping it simple will help them test the waters to how interested you really are. It will also leave room for discussion. If you ask too many questions up front the process can become daunting and the answers watered down. It’s not a perfect science, but it’s hard to go wrong if your motives are truly in helping the sales person you are managing.