7 Oddball Tactics to Motivate Your Sales Force

In most companies, if it isn’t about commissions, contests or reaching objectives, company goals and personal goals, sales managers don’t have many alternate ways to motivate their salespeople.  I thought it might be helpful to share 7 alternate ways that salespeople can be motivated.  Before you can take one of these approaches, you’ll need to know a little more about each of your salespeople.  For instance do they:

• Love to win – or hate to lose?  It’s a subtle difference, but you would take a completely different approach to motivate each of these two types of salespeople.  You might even have to help them determine which outcome is more motivational.  For example, nothing at all happens when I win – I just acknowledge the win and move on.  But something visceral occurs when I lose.  I might think about how that happened for 24 hours before moving on.  I hate to lose!  We might motivate salespeople who love to win by coaching them toward the win, whereas with salespeople who hate to lose we would first ask them how they will feel if they lose this opportunity and coach them not to lose it.
• Spend money to force performance – or perform and spend their commissions as a reward?  Just like the first example, the difference is subtle, but your motivational approach would be different.  I’ve always spent the money to put pressure on myself to perform.  Over the past 40 years I have learned that if I wait until the money is there my urgency to perform isn’t as great.  When you know which approach works best with each salesperson, and you know what they want, you can frame those goals in the proper context.
• Respond better to being pushed by the sales manager – or prefer to push themselves?  If you are familiar with the scene in “Facing the Giants”, you’ll have a good idea of what it means to be pushed to be the best.  Some salespeople need to be pushed while others will want to quit if you push them too much.  Identifying how they best respond allows you to either do the pushing, or learn how to provide them with a context to successfully push themselves.
• Perform better when closely managed – or when left alone?  Some salespeople cannot function well when left to their own devices.  They don’t self-start or self-direct and need to be directed and/or be part of a team.  One of my salespeople works best when he works independently – yet he needs to be supervised or he loses focus.  Another one of my salespeople works best when part of a team and he doesn’t need to be supervised.  He’ll do whatever we’ve agreed that he needs to do. When you are aware of these two variables and the preferences and needs of each salesperson, you can more effectively put each salesperson in a scenario where they can perform more consistently and effectively.
• Perform better when competing against others – or when competing against their own expectations?  I have always performed better when I compete against myself.  My son performs better when he competes against the most elite competitors.  He wants to be the best on the field that day.  What if you could get your mediocre salespeople to rise to the next level if the competition and the rewards were compelling enough?
• Respond better to recognition – or satisfaction after meeting and exceeding goals?  For some, it doesn’t get any better than hearing their names called out, receiving an award or plaque, reading about themselves on a website or being listed as the winner.  Others could care less about all of that because the self-satisfaction they get from knowing they’re the best is all they need. 
• Feel motivated by proving someone else wrong – or proving themselves right?  There are some salespeople who can be motivated to achieve greatness just because someone told them that they would fail at sales, that they weren’t ready for this role, that they couldn’t sell that big account, that they wouldn’t beat out that particular competitor, or that they could never earn that much money.  Others just need to validate their own beliefs.  As with some of the other approaches here, knowing which one is right for each salesperson provides you with a motivational advantage where the right words, at the right time can make all the difference in the world.