Changes in consumer behavior and the invention of new technologies have led to an evolution in the sales and marketing department. Companies are rapidly switching to telemarketing strategies to improve their sales and generate revenue and significant profit.
Telesales involves contacting existing and prospective buyers over the phone to inform them about their products and services. It helps maximize the opportunities across all areas of the sales department. Telesales agents use their communication skills to remotely develop nurturing and prospecting relationships with the target customer base.
Contrary to popular belief, telesales departments do not use a scripted process. In fact, telemarketing is much more than cold calling. So that means it takes skills, effort, and, most importantly, motivation. This article will help you keep your sales team motivated, so your company can continue to grow at a steady pace.
How to Motivate Your Sales Team? – Top 6 Secret Tips
A highly motivated sales team that always hits its goals in time may sound like a dream, but it is unachievable. Sales managers all over the globe are looking for practical ways to motivate their sales department employees. A motivated sales team is a top priority for all businesses. It is normal for telesales teams to become disengaged and demotivated after some time.
So, how can you ensure that your telemarketing team is always 100% motivated? Here are some effective tips you should try.
1. Build Trust with the Team Members
Trust is the foundation of motivation. It will be hard for your telesales team to feel inspired when it doesn’t believe you have the best interests at heart. Building trust with your team is essential to making them feel driven by their work.
An open and honest conversation regarding the team’s challenges and goals can help you re-inspire the members. And you can only openly communicate when your team trusts you completely. Communication, trust, and motivation make a vicious cycle. So, how can you develop and maintain trust with your team?
As a sales manager, you must work on engaging your telesales team with a consistent approach that nurtures them simultaneously. Ensure you’re utterly transparent with your team when discussing goals, challenges, and concerns.
Direct sentences like “I want to build more trust with you all” will persuade your team to discuss their issues with you too.
2. Ask the Members How They Would Like to Be Managed
To become a successful telesales team manager, you must know a few basic things. These are:
- Each member of your team has a different personality
- Learning about each member’s work style can help create better connections
- There is nothing wrong with modifying your behavior to fit your team’s needs
If you find it difficult to understand why you should change your leadership style, use the example of how different selling strategies work. Think about how sales teams always have to switch their selling styles to adjust to the changing customer buying behaviors. Using the same marketing strategy can hinder growth.
Similarly, you will eventually stop seeing results from your sales team when you do not try to meet their needs. The best way to figure out what your team needs is to ask them questions to understand their work style.
You can ask them questions like –
- What mode of communication do you prefer?
- How would you all like me to adjust my pace of interaction? Is weekly or monthly interaction better?
- How do you want to receive feedback?
3. Emphasize Collaboration before the Competition
As a sales team manager, you must know how competitive people in this field are by nature. While having a competitive approach in any area of work is important, more of this quality can create problems for the company.
It results in negative, unhealthy motivation when each team member goes head-to-head with the other. Soon, colleagues can begin to disregard or resent one another. It can lead to a significant drop in teamwork, causing a decrease in sales and revenue.
Therefore, it is crucial to foster and nourish collaboration above the competition. That said, you should not discourage competitive telesales people at all costs. Your only goal is to solidify their belief in teamwork so all members can work together toward the same goal.
So how can you encourage collaboration within your telesales team? You can encourage knowledge sharing and shift your focus to rewarding and mentoring. These are effective ways to promote collaboration and overcome unhealthy competition.
4. Recognize and Encourage Initiative
This tip helps motivate team members in the same vein as collaboration. Good sales team leaders recognize the unique capabilities of each member.
While it is easy to forget, take some time to recognize the skills and talents your team possesses as a whole. Then, categorize it to determine who can perform certain tasks better than others. Make sure to encourage your team members to express their ideas without hesitation.
Cultivating new ideas is extremely important to growing the business. Therefore, ascertain that your team believes it has the freedom and space to try new strategies to improve sales. Reward team members when they come forth with an effective initiative to encourage other customers to present new ideas.
5. Set Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Goals
As already mentioned, different salespeople have different personalities. It means each member of the team requires motivation differently. For example, some members of your telesales team may feel motivated by team-wide contests. Meanwhile, the quota achievement system may work well for others. Not to mention, money is the biggest source of motivation for many salespeople.
Setting daily, weekly, and monthly goals is an excellent way of motivating your telesales team. Here is how you can categorize goals and sales performance incentive funds (SPIF).
- Daily: Your team’s daily SPIF should be lightweight and fun.
- Weekly: Weekly goals are more tangible, setting metrics for significant improvement.
- Monthly: Monthly goals involve high-value rewards based on extraordinary individual performance.
6. Provide the Most Efficient and Advanced Tools and Technology
Last but not least, offer your team the tools and technology that reduce their labor work and make them more productive. Keep them away from monotonous tasks like keep dialing numbers manually, which almost eats 40% of the productive time telesales agents. Offer them the most advanced dialing technology with a Predictive dialer to make automated calls. By offering them the cloud-based outbound sales platform, you can reduce their geographical limitations and allow them to work anytime and anywhere.
Ending Note:
Only Monetorial motivation is not the way to keep your team up and high in performance. Sometimes higher money can’t offer work satisfaction and excitement. What they need is the right environment, a feeling of importance, and technology that makes the work not only more productive but easier too.
Those mentioned above are some of the most-effective tips to motivate telesales teams. Make sure to use these leading strategies to develop and nurture motivation among your team.