It happens to every sales team. Everyone is excited to start the year with ambitious sales goals, new digital marketing strategies, and perhaps even an 800 vanity number to help bring in leads. Six months later, things are completely different. Sales aren’t as strong as expected, those ambitious goals are looking more like a fantasy, and morale is low. After all, what’s the point of staying motivated when you think you’re doomed to fail?
As a sales manager, it’s vital to keep your sales team motivated through mid-year, even when things are looking less rosy than before. Here are three easy tips to keep the team positive.
1. Check In With Your Sales Team
In today’s fast-paced sales environment, a single goal-setting meeting per year isn’t enough for your sales team. It’s crucial to structure regular check-ins so that you have the best understanding of your sales team’s progress, especially if you want to proactively address any issues that can derail the team’s success.
Keep in mind that check-ins should include group meetings as well as one-on-one sessions. Use the time in group meetings to give an overview of the team’s progress and highlight what’s going well. This is also the perfect opportunity to employ the “praise in public” principle by calling attention to your best salespeople and any group accomplishments.
Your one-on-one check-ins, on the other hand, should focus on how each salesperson is progressing towards their individual goals. This is the time to address any obstacles that might be hindering performance, such as personal setbacks, training issues, and so on. Any criticisms or corrections you want to convey to your sales team should be done one-on-one as well, in keeping with the “criticize in private” principle.
You should also use your check-ins to update the team on your own goals. When you’re the boss, it’s easy to forget that you’re just as much a part of the sales team as everyone else. That means that you should be just as transparent about your commitments, whether that’s agreeing to fight for a new company policy with senior management or promising to hold a pizza party at the end of each quarter.
When your sales team knows that you’re just as serious about meeting your own targets as you are about helping them meet their targets, you’ll get a lot more respect, productivity, and motivation from your team members.
2. (Re-)Adjust Your Mid-Year Goals
When it’s time to set annual sales and performance goals, the easy approach is to evenly divide targets by half, quarter, or month. But most companies don’t expect sales volume to be constant throughout the year. For instance, a company that sells retail products likely will see peak sales through the fall (just before the holidays), while a business that helps people with their taxes will be busiest after the new year. In both cases, evenly dividing annual sales targets over the year is unrealistic, even if the total annual goal is reasonable.
When you forget to take into account the natural sales cycle of your products or services, you risk putting unneeded pressure on your sales team by giving them the impression that they should be overperforming at a time of year when business is slow for everyone. If you want to boost motivation in your sales team, then take the time to adjust your goals so that they reflect numbers that your sales team can achieve by mid-year.
Another opportunity for mid-year re-adjustment is to look at what’s working in general and have the team focus on your winning marketing strategies. For example, if your social media campaign is performing better than expected, then it might make sense to double down on that and put fewer resources into your less successful campaigns. That way, you’ll be handing your sales team more qualified leads and boosting motivation as well as conversion rates.
3. Make Sure You’re Tracking The Right Metrics
In the end, it doesn’t matter how well your sales team is doing if you’re not using the right tools to track progress. That’s why it’s so important to set the right key performance indicators (KPIs) and use the best tools available to measure those KPIs. For instance, when you’re in the middle of an inbound call marketing campaign, it’s not enough to simply measure how many calls each salesperson takes or how many calls result in a sale. While those are certainly important to know, there’s a lot more to measuring an effective call marketing campaign.
Modern call tracking platforms with 800 vanity numbers can give you a much better picture of your sales team’s performance by providing information such as when customers are likely to call, how many times a customer had called before, and even what they were looking at on your website before they decided to call. Call intelligence software can give you even more details, such as what customers are asking your sales team before making a purchase and how they’re comparing your business to the competition.
What does all this do for sales team motivation? Using an 800 vanity number with call tracking and call intelligence sends a message to your team members: you’re more interested in quality interactions between employees and customers rather than sheer call volume. And when your sales team can see that you’re keeping track of the bigger picture, they’re more likely to stay positive and motivated throughout the mid-year slump.
Ready to boost your sales team’s motivation and productivity? Get started today with a toll-free vanity number with call tracking!
