Brian Tracy University: Destroying De-motivators and Fostering Ambition May 06, 2008
By Brian Tracy
Other than a poor relationship with his manager, nothing derails a salesman's drive as effectively as the various forms of de-motivation a company can inadvertently create. These are the institutional problems that undermine a salesperson's motivation and sabotage their sales activities. As such, they must be nipped in the bud immediately.
1. Lack of direction. This occurs when the salesperson is not completely clear about what is expected of him day in and day out, what his specific sales goals and quotas are, how he will be measured and in what time period. If clarity is 95% of success, then lack of clarity is 95% of failure.
2. Lack of feedback. As Ken Blanchard says, "Feedback is the breakfast of champions." Whether weekly, daily or even hourly, the best people need to know exactly how they are doing relative to their goals and quotas to assure maximum performance.
The simplest way to give feedback is to pick up the phone or personally congratulate a salesperson who has just made a sale. You can also hold weekly sales meetings to tell everybody what is going on and how well each of the reps are doing. Summarize sales results from the highest to the lowest, then distribute them each week either by e-mail or in written reports.
3. Lack of recognition. When a person works hard, overcomes obstacles and finally achieves (or exceeds) their sales quota, yet nothing is said about it, the individual can easily become discouraged. Recognition can take many forms. Praise the top performer in front of the others. Take the salesperson who has just made a sale to a senior executive and "brag on him" to the executive.
4. Lack of rewards. This occurs when a person works extremely hard to achieve a sales result … and then receives no special reward or benefit from it. This is easily fixable, and often inexpensive to do. One company I worked with would treat the top salesperson of the month to lunch with a senior person. The best salespeople competed vigorously with each other for this privilege.
5. Role overlap. Sometimes companies get into trouble by assigning more than one salesperson to the same account or customer. Role overlap leads to confusion, inefficiency and often resentment. The cure is to make sure that each job is assigned to only one person who is completely responsible for its success or completion.
6. Role underlap. This occurs when an essential part of the job—such as following up on delivery or customer service—is not assigned to anyone in particular, but everyone is expected to be concerned about it. Whenever role underlap takes place, parts of the job will simply not be done, accompanied by the expected finger-pointing. The solution is to make sure every part of every job is assigned to a particular person who can then be held responsible.
7. Role contradiction. Last but not least, salespeople are often asked to spend the entire day prospecting and developing new accounts. They're then required to fill out detailed customer and sales reports that require them to spend half of the day in the office. But they can't do both.
The best way to solve this is to have a single person focus on the most important part of the job that he can do, then assign the rest to a separate person. As it grows, every successful company creates the position of sales assistant or sales secretary for this very reason.
Brian Tracy is one of the top sales and management trainers in the world. He is president of Brian Tracy University online (www.briantracyu.com), which offers certificates in superior sales management and high performance selling.
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