Nov 07, 2014 By Bob Marsh

4 Signs You Need a Sales Motivation Solution—Stat!

When it comes to motivating sales reps to focus their efforts effectively, there are many different factors at play. You need to consider how you’ll: Identify the metrics you want your team focused on, actually get your team focused around the behaviors that will drive those metrics, and then recognize and celebrate those who are executing. It sounds like really basic stuff, but the challenge comes in how to manage all that in a simple and effective way.

Let’s say your company just made a massive investment in a booth at an upcoming conference. Now you need to make sure your sales team is inviting your top customers and prospects to your booth or to an evening event. How do you do that exactly? Don’t tell me a spreadsheet! Don’t tell me by creating a report that will get buried and forgotten! It’s time to execute and rally your team to create a big return on that big investment.

Here are four distinct signs that it’s time to get a sales motivation solution in place:

1. You want to get more out of your sales team

Even your best salespeople aren’t closing deals all day long. They spend 98% of their time on the behaviors and activities they HOPE will lead to sales. This means there is a load of productivity waste, and where you as a leader need to help rally the troops around the behaviors that matter. Depending on the state of your business, it might be generating more Sales Qualified Leads, moving existing opportunities through the pipeline faster, onboarding new salespeople faster, taking a new product to market or following up on a new set of leads from marketing before they get stale.

Sales motivation software can help you figure out which behaviors have the most impact in your environment. Once you get your team rallied around a certain activity, it becomes pretty clear how that affects your bottom line. The great part? Once you identify the behaviors most critical to your business, you can use the same software to optimize performance over time.

2. You already run sales contests...

...but you’re dreading the thought of whiteboards, spreadsheets and email updates to track and communicate those contest standings. You’ve made huge investments in marketing automation and CRM software, and then you switch to completely non-technical methods to get the attention of your sales team, which ends up being a huge time suck for you and your sales operations team.

Sales motivation software is an easy fix for the manual labor involved in running an internal sales campaign. Not only are points and standings tracked with accuracy, but they’re also real-time, accessible via multiple devices, presented with a strong creative design and able to get people collaborating with each other. This way you can spend more of your time coaching performance and less time tracking performance.

3. You need to amp up collaboration across your team

Injecting your sales force with a healthy dose of competition fuels collaboration. Sales motivation software increases visibility and recognition around sales performance, opening opportunities for collaboration across the whole company. When your reps see a colleague at the top of a leaderboard, they become self-motivated to seek out that top performer for advice; when reps fall below where they’d like to appear on the leaderboard, they’ll be inspired to seek out sales leaders for coaching. And even beyond that, competitions offer an easy way to get different departments and offices working together, too.

4. You need stronger sales and marketing alignment

Let’s say marketing has a big initiative that sales could amplify the results of—maybe it’s a new marketing campaign—and sales could really help by quickly following-up and sharing feedback on the quality of the leads. Oftentimes it’s not that the sales team doesn’t want to help; it’s just that they are already juggling a lot of priorities and will remain pretty focused on the deals they’re closing right now. So instead of telling them to drop everything, you’re just asking them to nudge their attention a little and align with your key marketing campaigns. Redirecting a team’s focus just a little can have dramatic impact and help ensure those big marketing investments pay off.

For any sales leader, constantly maintaining a sales team’s motivation and focus can be tough. There are so many behaviors that are crucial to a salesperson’s success, and so many elements that go into closing a deal, that it can be tricky to stay on top of it all. Sales motivation software allows you to keep your entire team rowing in the same direction and focus their energy on what’s most important.

About the Author

Bob Marsh is the CEO and Founder of Detroit-based startup LevelEleven. He has almost 20 years in sales and sales management, and played a key role in establishing HelloWorld as the dominant player in digital engagement solutions. In 2012, Bob launched LevelEleven, a company gamifying CRM with high-impact competitions, and introduced its flagship product, Compete, which has since seen incredible adoption. Within the first six months LevelEleven secured over 70 clients - including Comcast, Delta Airlines, the Detroit Pistons, and OpenTable. Bob is a thought-leader in the sales management and enterprise gamification space. A native Michigander, Bob is passionate about revitalizing Detroit and nurturing the startup ecosystem that has developed in the city.