Motivate Thyself and Thine Sales team?

Looking at myself in the mirror, do I see an achieved individual?  I might be high-headed enough to regret it or overambitious enough to never accept it. That might be the case because I have gotten used to associating true success with numbers and not with an intrinsic satisfaction, when that is what gets us out of bed everyday.

Tilting my head up, I see a poster nailed to the wallpaper next to my workstation that reads , ‘Sis pacis, pro bellum,’ a quote by Aristotle. In English, it means ‘If you seek peace, prepare for war’. Better understood, it is the outside world internalized, as Bob Urichuck puts it, that one is on a constant warfare with in order to seek peace. Growing up through the wonder years, one thing that we learn the quickest is how to let the insignificant others of our lives dictate our lives by making us chase the single worst motivator for every action, and that is money.

Sooner or later, it is the fear of loosing anything and everything that adds up to loosing numbers, and that translates into money and more money, which is the cause of all of our woes. As Bob Urichuck puts it, that is the layered truth and not the real truth. In order to get to the real truth, the rule of 3 plus is necessary, discussed in his book ‘Up Your Bottom Line’. Quoting Bob Urichuck, going by the 3 plus rule, it is wiser to ask another question at every step: If you work for money, why do you need that money? What do you do with the money you take home? Where do you plan to go? The answer ultimately translates to a lifestyle desired instead.

A lot of psychoanalytic talk and no sales, makes the salesman a dull boy? Not necessarily. As Bob Urichuck puts it, certain disciplinary changes needs to be introduced at the individual level, at the organizational level, and only then can a productive sales team can be put to work. All the rest aside, it is all about essentially keeping oneself motivated. But be careful, it is not as easily done as said.

Keeping Thyself Motivated

• Grab a notepad and list down all your dreams. As Bob puts it, if its not there, its never happening. After all, isn’t it what life should be about? Living Your Dreams! A bit of acknowledgement goes a long way.
• Materialize those dreams into personal goals prioritizing thyself as the most important person in thine life. Start out with a broader scope spanning over a 10 year period committed to what will make you happy, and not the insignificant others. Narrow it down to 5 years to a year and what you need to be doing now at this hour.
• Give yourself the right to fail, in order to find success down the road. Instead of sitting and thinking about what could have been that can lead one to never acting on anything at all, it is better to take the chance and learn from failure in order to gain good judgment, necessary for success.
• Develop the kind of attitude and behavior necessary for living a fulfilled life. It is ultimately behavior management at the individual’s end and at the end of the sales manager.

Keeping Thine Team Motivated

The trickle down effect wouldn’t take much longer if the individual has it within himself to give it out to his team. The individual can be the top-line executive, a sales manager or even the salesperson. Here is what is needed to make it possible:

• An intrinsically motivating working environment.
• Following the rule of 3 plus and growing an attitude and a behavior that focuses on highlighting personal goals of the team member and helping the person reach his/her personal goals while the company reaches its corporate goals.
• Putting into place the sales-related training tools that rightfully address sales fundamentals of the changing times, or else the money allocated to your sakes budget is money wasted.
• Job of a sales manager is not to give targets but instead to build a relationship with his/her sales team and transfer the learning to his/her team; As Bob puts it, the higher the network of the individual, the higher the net worth. Similar to personal goals that start out broader and are then narrowed down, each sales person from the team should be trained to bring sales targets compiled as a draft sales plan. The sales managers should then work with each individual from the team making the targets realistic, and point out behaviors to be acted out on a daily basis in order to reach those targets. At the end of the say, the sales manager is not managing numbers but relationships and behaviors.

New Fundamentals Of The Changing Times

According to Charles Kettering, ‘The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress’. Well said, in order to seek progress today, the one thing that cannot be right-sized or downsized at all is your sales team. How else will you make business? So why isn’t it being done. Few fundamentals of the forgone times that need to be turned around are discussed below:

• The money hogging, fancy dressing salesperson that only did ‘yap-yap’ in the olden days needs to be a more of a listener today.
• The sales person of yesterday who was only trained to sell has to be trained to buy, today.
• Quoting Bob, the salesperson of today should be able to qualify the customer and reject him/her instead of having the customer qualify and then reject the salesperson.

Last but not the least, follow your Pareto’s Principle or 80-20 rule smartly by profiling the lifestyle and psychographics of your A customer that generate maximum profit. Using marketing tools intelligently, the existing profile of customers should help the sales person prospect for more from the existing customer base.

If I have managed to gear to your interest in the piece, I feel successful for having shared with you what I learned about motivating oneself and the sales force when Bob Urichuck, one of the top ranking sales gurus dropped by at CIO Webstudio for an interview. You can always choose to expand from here, by visiting Bob at www.bobu.com.