Great Sales Management and Motivation
I’m researching sales motivation for an upcoming Business Expert Webinar, “Why Your Salespeople Don’t Work For You….and Never Will.” As part of my research, I sourced Proactive Sales Management expecting to find a chapter on sales management’s role of motivating their staff.
Surprisingly, there is no chapter!
This missing ingredient drove me to one of my favorite books on leadership and sales management, Buckingham’s The One Thing You Need to Know….about Great Managing, Great Leading and Sustained Individual Success
In his research, Buckingham highlights four practices of successful sales managers. Notice that two of these relate to motivation:
- Selecting the Right People
- In hiring someone for the team, the manager is hiring a person gifted with predictable patterns of emotion, learning, memory and behavior (74).
- Defining clear expectations
- Buckingham states that the second skill of great managers is to define clear expectations and that the manager articulates these expectations at every opportunity (76).
- Giving praise and motivation
- In studying high performance managers, Buckingham discovers that these managers, in addition to recognizing and praising above-and-beyond excellence, will also “…notice incremental improvements in performance and celebrate it” (79). Leaders, understand the psychological principle of positive reinforcement.
- Showing you care for your people
- High performance sales managers succeed because they are able to draw the best out of their staff. According to Buckingham, “…the only way to pull this off is to make certain your employees believe, genuinely believe, that their success is your primary goal” (42).
So, as the leaders, how do you show that you really you care for your staff? How do you draw the best of them? How do you discover their goals, dreams, and aspirations? I look forward to hearing from you!