Stop throwing money away
To motivate today's sales force, you'll need to do more than promise a big commission check
By Susan L. P. Srikonda -- Industrial Distribution, 2/1/2000
The performance demands placed on distribution sales managers seem to magnify each year in the face of new competition, shrinking profit margins, a shortage of employment candidates and ever-increasing customer requirements. With all those demands, the need is greater than ever for a sales manager to understand how to motivate his or her sales force to consistently achieve maximum performance.Meeting that objective is difficult in today's tight job market, when distributors are constantly hearing that money isn't everything. Salespeople can move easily between companies and even industries today and in response, companies are creating a staggering variety of benefits packages. So if providing financial incentives isn't the key to motivating salespeople, what is?
What follows are 10 tips for motivating today's sales forces, contributed by sales professionals from three of the industry's leading distributorships -- Chris Union, vice president of sales and service, Cameron & Barkley; Phil Schweers, vice president and general manager, East Division, Motion Industries; and Kim Holscher, regional manager, BC Bearing -- as well as by Tom Reilly, author and president of Sales Motivational Services, Chesterfield, Mo.
1 Hire the right person
First things first: you can't turn someone into a star seller who doesn't have the aptitude or desire to succeed. It sounds simple, but it's important for distributors to keep this in mind as they face pressure to get qualified applicants in the door.
"We need to ensure that we hire or have people that are capable of learning the skills, applications and products that the customers need," Union says. "And this needs to be coupled with a competitive personality and a desire to excel. People always make the difference."
2 Understand what drives behavior
One of the biggest mistakes sales managers can make is to assume all members of their sales teams are motivated the same way.
Reilly contributes this true-story example: Company A offers a $300 leather briefcase as a reward to its inside sales staff. But making a good physical impression isn't a priority for these staff members, who never meet clients face-to-face, so why would a tony leather briefcase be an incentive? Reilly says this is clearly a case of corporate executives projecting their own values onto their employees.
"Managers often confuse values with motivation," Reilly says. "Everyone is motivated by something. When you look at the very core of motivated behavior, what you have are values that drive behavior ... Managers tend to assume that what motivates them motivates other people as well. And in many cases they'll look at a sales [representative] who is underachieving and assume they're undermotivated. But in fact, they may just have different values than the sales manager and are motivated in moving towards those values."
3 Motivate individuals, not the team
The sales contest is a motivational device as enduring as it is ineffectual.
"In general, highly motivated people are not impressed with your typical sales contest," says Schweers. "We have had some of these be less than successful. And sales promotions that do not have the 'buy in' of the sales force or have the appearance of being 'forced' have also not met our expectations."
"Many times a sales program brings everyone to a common denominator and, unfortunately, it's often a low one," Holscher says.
It's difficult to choose one incentive that can motivate a team of individuals. The key, therefore, is to motivate the individual and not the team.
"Most sales people are highly independent by nature," Reilly says. "Group incentives reward mediocre performers and demotivate top achievers. A top achiever knows at a gut level that the harder they work, the farther they get dragged down by the mediocre performer when it comes to day-to-day performance incentives."
4 Spend time in the field
If a sales manager can't motivate an entire sales force with a blanket approach, then it's critical that the sales manager spend the time out in the field and get to know what motivates his or her salespeople individually.
"Money is a secondary motivator. People don't work for money," Reilly says, "they work for what money buys them and that's what really motivates them -- whether it buys them time, objects, power, security, etc. There is no single motivator for salespeople.
"With 19 years of sales training, I can guarantee you that managers will throw money at a problem faster than they will their own time," Reilly says. "But it's time that salespeople need, not necessarily the money. Any time a manager spends time with an employee, fundamentally what they're saying to that person is 'you're pretty valuable.'"
With firsthand experience from the field, Holscher says "it's important for sales managers to spend time in the field working with individual salespeople, developing them and being a resource for them. We need to find field time to spend with them, and with their important customers as well."
Reilly cautions against sales managers carrying their own territories, and also promotes the idea that they should be compensated based on the performance of their sales team, rather than on their own commissions.
5 Train employees for success
It's next to impossible to motivate a sales force that doesn't feel adequately prepared to do its job. So, it's essential to provide your salespeople with the skill- and application-based training that will enable them to be of real service to their customers.
"We need to teach the account representatives how to sell in different levels of a customer's organization," Union says. "The days of product selling are dead. Customers are not interested in buying products because we choose to run a promotion or the supplier wants to move product ... Reps need to recommend and sell only those products that add value to the customer's process or business.
"[Account representatives] also need application-based training," Union says, "where they learn about the customer's industry and how they operate. We need to help the AR's to understand what it is the customer does and how they make money. Once we have a full understanding of the customer, then we can apply our core competencies to the customer and provide a solution that is a win-win."
6 Clearly define goals and objectives
It's important for a company to clearly define its goals in both sales and profits at the corporate, divisional, regional, branch and individual levels.
"In order for people to be motivated, they must clearly understand what is expected [of them] and believe that it is reasonable and attainable," Schweers says. "We detail both verbally and in writing our expectations of the outside sales staff."
Schweers says Motion Industries involves outside salespeople in the process of developing sales and gross profit goals by product category, and in the plans to implement corporate sales strategies in their territories. The focus, Schweers says, is to have the sales force "buy in" to the established goals.
7 Communicate a corporate vision
Both Union and Holscher say it's important for a company to communicate its vision to its sales staff.
"Everyone one wants [to see] a vision of where their company is going and where they can go with the company," Union says. "Once an employee sees how they can or will fit into this vision, they will be inspired to do their part to execute the plan. This makes communications an extremely important aspect of motivating a sales force."
"They have to have a sense of vision first for themselves as individuals, and then how that interfaces with the branch and then the company," Holscher says. "They have to have some sense of 'buy in' to the vision. This is important at the individual level. The successful salespeople that we deal with are individuals, first and foremost, and if they don't have a sense of individual buy in at the front end, we've lost them."
8 Provide reinforcement and feedback
Companies need to establish consistent channels for feedback that provide salespeople with timely action and support related to their sales performance and efforts.
"This may be the most important motivational technique to consider," says Schweers. "It's imperative after goals and strategies have been established that each member of the sales force understands how management views their performance as the year progresses.
"We use several techniques to accomplish this, but I believe the most important is an evaluation format we utilize to review year-to-date performance and also to review and rate key areas such as listening, overcoming objections, handling rejection, etc.," Schweers says. "I have seen mediocre performers become 'stars' with this format. It is also an opportune time to assist with developing the outside salesperson's short term and long range career objectives and to mentor this process."
9 Create room for growth
Distributors need to provide their sales teams with opportunities for both personal and professional growth in order to stay in touch with the changing role of the outside salesperson in today's market.
It can be beneficial to create opportunities for senior salespeople to foster and mentor junior sales staff, Holscher says. Such opportunities help create a balance, he says, between salespeople excelling as individuals and creating a healthy sense of interdependence among members of a sales team.
Reilly says that everyone has a need to express him or herself creatively, and that salespeople often evaluate their positions by asking growth-related questions like: Do I have some authority? Can I grow in this job? Is there opportunity for me in this job? Am I needed and is what I do meaningful? How important is the stuff that I do day in and day out? Am I appreciated? Can I input on this job creatively? Do I have some freedom to invent and explore?
10 Structure fair financial rewards
Having established that money isn't the only thing that motivates salespeople, its place as one motivating factor still must be recognized. Distributors first have to start with the basics: providing a fundamental benefits package, security in the organization, opportunity for advancement, opportunity for input, and a fair and consistent compensation plan.
"The best way to demoralize a sales force is to constantly change the compensation plan or establish unrealistic criteria," Schweers says. "But I believe most successful outside salespeople want and expect recognition for their accomplishments, along with fair and consistent compensation."
Just how to compensate a sales force is increasingly becoming an issue for distributors as the marketplace changes and more business-to-business deals are brokered.
"One of the modern balances we're addressing now is ensuring that we're paying money for the right activities and in some cases now with business-to-business relationships, it's not always measured by increasing sales dollars," Holscher says. "But money is and always will be important. Top performers are driven by other things as well, and in some cases those things are even above money. But they won't happen in the absence of money."
Cameron & Barkley is answering this quandary by writing "management by objectives" into the compensation plan which address the activities that lead to success, Union says.
"We do not want to pay extra money for product sales or growth," Union says. "MBO goals should be based on meeting the goals of the customers. And once these goals are met, it becomes very important to communicate that success. All people want to do well in their roles."
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