Best Practices for Motivating Your Sales Team

As part of an ongoing effort to enhance Lucep’s branding as a sales industry expert, we have been organizing a series of expert panel discussions in different markets to discuss sales issues, challenges and best practices.

A recent event in this series was held in Bangalore at the BHIVE Workspace. This Sales for Startups event included an audience Q&A session where attendees got to ask the experts their questions about startup sales.

The video clip and transcript below show Lucep Co-founder and Director for Marketing & Sales Zal Dastur and his panel of sales experts answering one such audience question about best practices for motivating your sales team.

Transcript :-

Audience: My name is Gill. I am founder of Plan My Tour. My question is that…like kind of guy…I am a techie basically, I am not a salesperson by nature, but by the situation. For example, I will not pick up the phone to call the customer, but when customer calls me I am into that mode. You know I have felt…right now we have a team, a sales team. So… and I see that sales is the…other flip side of failure, because there is a ten percent to five percent, twenty percent successful or do you crack the deal. So 80 percent is the failure. So what keeps motivating, or what could be the motivation factor for the sales guy to…you know, come to office, to have that positive mindset. Because that is very very important for the guys to have the positive mind set. Yes. Today is my day. Today I am going to do the thing. So are there some best practices or something or some… what should be keep motivating. Something like that.

Mangal Karnad, FableSquare: I think… I don’t have a solid answer for that. Maybe… there is a…every no takes you closer to a yes. That’s…that’s what I would like to say. I mean…look at it, okay look at the simple point of…have you ever tried to get an auto to go where you want them to go, without asking for extra money. Okay, I have done that enough times.

Zal Dastur, Lucep: Cool. They do that to everybody. I thought it was just me.

Mangal Karnad, FableSquare: You just keep asking enough autos, there will be somebody who would want to come, right? I am probably making it light, but…get more of no’s. I don’t know… you should probably…

Rakesh Sharma, BHIVE: I think it starts from the kind of people you have, right? So when you hire people, and since you are the guy who has to…say motor behind all the…the vision behind the business…of course, if you can’t motivate, no one else can motivate. So, I think, if I were in your place, the first task I would do at 9 A.M, stand up and give a ten minutes motivation talk. That…that really works. Second is you need to again, you know, understand the people you are working with. So you know different kind of people. Some people will be process driven, some people would be target driven, some people would be incentive driven…can you do it? You can’t do it, what about. So you have to ascertain which price, what person…build a business. No, you have to be after their lives. Sometime you have to put enough pressure on them, you have to motivate them, you have to try every trick in the trade to get the things work. There is no one particular finisher that you can do it and this will happen, right. You have to…everyday you have to devise your in-house strategy. Today how do I motivate these people, tomorrow…it might work for two days, third day it won’t work. So I think that’s…that’s your job, right, to motivate them…to ensure that every day, you have a new trick up the sleeve

Mangal Karnad, FableSquare: I would also like to say that probably having sufficient number of suspects…set a goal…okay. I think you can also work backwards from a kind of goal that you want to set for your company. I…I am a certified coach, so pardon me for saying this so I will say that goal setting helps you. Set a goal and work backwards. Probably you will also get an idea as to how many suspects, how many prospects, qualified leads. But there is no shortcut to sales. I would say keep on hitting at it.

Sumukha Rao, Ta3s: So if you ask me few years back I would say commission drives sales people, right. But I think the first and foremost…I think the mentality globally is people are not used to listening now. The first thing a salesperson would understand and appreciate is a person saying no. At least he is saying no and he is not letting you hanging in between because you are going to spend substantial amount of time wasting without knowing the answer, right? So you expect that from day one as a salesperson, as a person as well…from…as a owner of a business.

Number two is, you know, give them the method of qualifying it properly, teach them. I…I took a sales girl and it took me three months in order to equip her and today she is moving on to…ever since…medium and large enterprises. But give that amount of time for them to understand what you are trying to sell. They are not selling technical product. They are selling solutions to a business problem, right? It’s very important. Your technical product is actually a solution…a business solution to a particular customer. So you have to translate technology to a business problem…or a solution to a business problem. So you need to train them around that and not technical. You can’t explain a salesperson technical… technicalities to that extent. You need to be able to tell them how to translate that to business. So it takes time. Give them the time. Give them the benefit of time for them to get engaged with those customers. They are also trying. What kind of customers they need to sell into. And once you get into that three months bracket, yes, when you start putting targets on them in terms of qualification, short listing, leads, you know, and account management, going forward. So this…this is a whole set of process. It’s a step by step process which you need to follow, and once you follow that diligently they will love it.

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