How to Motivate Your Sales Force

I have been fortunate to work with hundreds of salespeople. Each one was different and developed a unique selling style. Maximizing their performance was always more a matter of coaching to help them achieve more than they could achieve on their own.

Here are some basic guidelines that I have followed to help motivate sales folks and increase sales:

1. Keep It Simple! Sales people are busy - they make multiple sales calls each day and constantly answer questions from customers and the factory. Make your message stand out from other messages. It must be both clear and concise.

2. Limit Your Messages! Never try to give multiple inputs at one time. Always space new information so it can be absorbed and acted on before providing more input.

3. Create Recognition! Sales advisory councils are excellent ways to recognize outstanding effort and gain terrific input at the same time. Arrange a meeting with a select group of representatives from the sales group to discuss issues that affect them. Publicize the results.

4. Create Competition! Develop an awards program to generate interest. Establish multiple criteria. Announce monthly progress. Create a visible presentation. Establish a trophy and a list of past recipients.

5. Incentivize! The bigger the results you want, the bigger the incentives should be. At one company, we doubled sales in just two years through sales incentives.


However you motivate your sales force, always remember the goal is to better serve the customer.