What REALLY Motivates Your Sales Team at Corporate Sales Training

Do you like motivational speakers? Most of us do. They make us feel good and pumped up with adrenaline, at least for a couple of hours. But what happens when the glow of a motivational speech wears off in a couple of days?

The truth is that while motivational speeches may give salespeople a temporary boost of confidence, this tends to go away as soon as they are faced with the challenges of the workaday world and they realize they need more than a bit of positive thinking to resolve them.

I find that the best way to improve the motivation of salespeople is to give them corporate sales training to improve their sales skills and the ability to solve problems. Let’s examine the factors behind salesperson motivation.

Extrinsic Factors

Factors that affect the motivation of sales people can be extrinsic or intrinsic. Extrinsic factors are ones that the salesperson and their company cannot control. For example:

• New government laws or regulations

• Market conditions (e.g.  the price of oil dropped by 70 %)

• Actions by their competition

• The general economy

• Adverse world events

• The weather, or seasonal fluctuations

• Changing processes of buyers

In general, you cannot do anything about these things. While your salespeople should take them into account when building their books of business (and they can take advantage of adverse conditions in some cases), your focus should be on the factors listed below.

Intrinsic Factors

Intrinsic motivation comes from within. Managers can affect the intrinsic motivation of their sales people in several ways:

• Put them in the sales role (hunter, farmer, inside sales, CSR, etc.) where they have a lot of natural aptitude (right seat on the sales bus)

• Provide competitive compensation plans

• Hire motivational speakers

• Develop company sales and marketing processes which highly support salespeople

• Upgrade their tech tools (e.g. newest smartphone, CRM system, tablet with videos of their offerings, the premium level on LinkedIn, etc.)

• Give product knowledge training

• Provide corporate sales training that includes role playing, interactivity and group exercises to improve skills

According to my data, the intrinsic factor that has the least amount of benefit to sales people is to hire motivational speakers. And the most effective factor that will improve their intrinsic motivation is sales skills.

Once salespeople realize that they will be able to close sales FASTER with their new corporate sales training skills, and therefore make A LOT MORE MONEY, their intrinsic motivation improves markedly. This is true even when they are faced with tough extrinsic factors such as a poor economy or even tough intrinsic ones, such as challenging compensation plans. When you teach a man to fish, he becomes confident in his ability to survive – and sales skills are the best way to give salespeople the ability to catch fish, so to speak.

Asher has a full menu of corporate sales training programs for both SMBs and the enterprise. If you are having a tough time motivating your salespeople, let us design a custom-made solution for you which includes aptitude testing and selling skills training. It could literally transform your company — FAST.