This document provides tips for motivating sales staff. It discusses using commissions, contests, bonuses and other incentives to inspire sales teams. It recommends identifying what specifically excites individual team members, such as cash, gifts or job satisfaction. Motivating tactics mentioned include making commissions a driving force, building winning teams through collaboration, adding peer pressure through public metrics, getting company-wide buy-in for sales, and keeping motivation frequent and tied to daily goals.

1. How To:
Motivate Your Sales Staff
Get creative with contests, commissions and bonuses to inspire
your team.

2. Selling is a tough job—tough on the ego, tough on the energy
level—which explains why sales reps are often some of a
company’s highest-paid employees. But even a fat salary is
usually not enough to combat steep competition, finicky
customers and grumpy prospects.
“If compensation were a sufficient motivator, your people would
already be performing,” says sales consultant and executive
coach Mark Palmer. Instead, it is critical to identify what excites
your people—maybe it’s cash, certain gifts, prestige, peer
recognition or job satisfaction. But there is one unifying quality
of all leading sales reps: “They want to be on top, and they want
to be unique,” Palmer says. “They want to win.”

3. ⇒ Make commission a driving force.
To get the results you want, shake up your commission
structure. If you want to push a new product, offer a higher
cut for that model. Make sure staff members are encouraged
to land the big fish with proportionally big payoffs. Johnson
once worked for an insurance company where the receding
commission structure discouraged sales reps from going
after the big, tougher-to-sell policies. The midsized policies
were the reps’ sweet spot, and cost the company lots of lost,
big, profitable policies.

4. ⇒ Build winning teams.
Creating sales teams—in which there is an incentive for
each member to support, mentor and encourage the other
members—has proven valuable in many ways.

5. ⇒ Build in peer pressure.
Publicly posting sales, margins and conversion rates lights a
flame under everyone.

6. ⇒ Get the whole company behind the
sale.
After all, the whole organization’s survival depends on the
sales department’s success. Announce contests and
campaigns to the whole firm. Encourage supporting
departments—such as customer service, engineering and
marketing—to be supportive of the sales staff’s efforts.

7. ⇒ Find out what motivates.
Ask your sales team what they want. Experiment with
different bonuses and prizes. Often, cash is king. Sometimes
highly luxurious items that are reluctant self-purchases
might be big winners. Other times, less tangible prizes—
such as the ability to telecommute once a week—can
resonate with staff.

8. ⇒ Keep it frequent.
The key to successfully motivating sales staff is to build a
strategy into the daily work. Small but frequent tokens of
accomplishment might include a can of soda for making a
daily quota, or an early out on a Friday for a week well-done.

9. 8 Remarkable Ways to Motivate Your
Sales Team
Do you truly understand what motivates your sales team?
According to Salesforce.com, “It’s important to keep your salespeople
motivated, and it’s one of the best ways to keep your sales flowing.” As
HBR.org writer Thomas Steenburgh explains, to motivate salespeople,
companies often stage grand kickoff meetings to announce new bonus
programs. They promise exotic trips to rainmakers. When business is slow,
they hold sales contests. If sales targets are missed, they blame the sales
compensation plan and start from square one.
Unfortunately, many short-term, fly-by-night tactics don’t work — especially
when it comes to small business sales. So, we asked business leaders
across the nation to share what works best for their organizations, and here’s
what they had to say:

10. 1. Create an open ‘sales’ culture.
“Encourage an open culture. The primary element is an
openness to let your sales professionals fail. The reality is that
goals are stunted by a fear of failing. Sales professionals tend to
be inherent risk takers and when we create an environment that
allows them to take more risks they get energetic and super-
motivated. The icing on the cake is that your sales team will
begin to set huge goals, think outside the box and go places
other companies aren’t willing to go, which will result in a
significantly increased bottom line for you!”
- Bob Elster, CEO and Founder of Potential – Executive Coaching
and Speaking

11. 2. Roll up your sleeves… and sell.
“Dive in to the trenches, and be a part of your sales team.
Every CEO would gain a massive ROI on time spent, by
spending just 10 minutes a day making sales calls side by
side with your sales team. From my experience, this will
motivate your sales team and help take sales to the next
level.”
- Miki Segal, CMO of JMAC Supply

12. 3. Remember: Energy, excitement, and
payoff.
“Motivating a sales team is about energy, excitement and payoff.
By approaching the day with energy, you will encourage your
team to do the same; this will result in higher call volumes, better
conversations and ultimately greater results. By responding to
your sales teams questions and updates with excitement, you
will in-turn keep their morale up and encourage them to close
deals with the highest margin. By ensuring proper payoff
through, both, cash and praise you can [motivate] each employee
to [strive for recognition]. Through energy, excitement and payoff
you can keep your sales team sharp, motivated, and yielding the
highest possible results.”
- Scott Selenow, President and CEO of Immerse Agency

13. 4. Lead by example.
“Demonstrate how your sales team should treat their own
managed client accounts; they should provide exceptional
service and take a personal interest in each and every customer
relationship. This is how you develop lasting connections and
accounts that will generate significant revenue for many years to
come. This motivates a sales team because it works; it’s the right
way for sales people to conduct business.”
- Michael Talve, Founder and CEO of The Expert Institute

14. 5. Communicate with your sales team.
“Keep yourself immersed in the sales process and day-to-
day struggles. It is tough to be empathetic, lead your team,
and make strategic decisions without critical information
about what is happening on the ground. Not only is it
important to schedule meetings for information sharing, it is
also important to have some sort of ‘fire alarm’ point-of-
contact so you can assist in problem-solving, immediately.”
- Jaimie McFarlin, Executive Director of AdmitLink
Consulting

15. 6. Organize weekly sales meetings.
“The best thing to happen to our sales team was when we
decided to organize a weekly meeting where [we] I sit down
with them and talk about everything that went great for the
week, and things that need to be improved upon. In these
meetings we go over the goals we want to hit for the next
week, we listen to the personal needs of the team, and we
set up a plan of action. We also keep a pulse on customer
feedback. You can learn a lot about how your sales team is
doing based upon customer feedback.”
- Dana Case, Director of Operations at MyCorporation.com

16. 7. Change your business development
model.
“At one point I analyzed our 6 million dollar client base and
realized 60% of our clients weren’t profitable and, incidentally, it
was the same 60% of our clients we didn’t like, respect or trust. In
short, 60% of our clients sucked! So, one New Year’s Day I sent a
note to my entire staff that read, ‘Beginning now, our new criteria
for taking on new business will be that we like the client and that
they are prepared to pay our price. Do not deviate from this and
follow your intuition, and don’t try to make any potential clients
fit into our culture, people, and what we stand for.’ Morale shot
up 1,000 percent; all of a sudden, we were making money on
every project. It was amazing. My staff was happy and the sales
team sold more!”
- Troy Hazard, Founder and CEO of Troy Hazard International

17. 8. Consider bonus-based performance
incentives.
“Money is always the biggest motivating factor for any sales
team. Our tip is to incentivize and pay a big portion of a sale
as commission to whichever person on the team got the job
done. A great idea is to also include a bonus based on
performance, or at least bonuses for the top performers of
the team. Doing so will create competition within the sales
team, pushing individual members to go above and beyond
to close out as many successful sales as they can.”
- Ian Aronovich, CEO of GovernmentAuctions.org

18. THANK YOU!