Telemarketing Software Featured Article

A recent statistic left me speechless. Roughly 54 percent of sales agents do not make their monthly quota each month, according to SiriusDecisions.

That’s a crazy high percentage, if you think about it.

Part of the problem could be setting unrealistic goals. But part of it also is motivating agents, an ongoing challenge for management.

Here are five ways that sales managers can keep their staff motivated and enable them to actually hit those sales goals.

1. Share individual best practices. One way to motivate and improve sales is by creating a forum where agent best practices can be recognized and shared. This both gives a sense of pride to high-performing agents, and shows underperforming agents how to improve.

2. Promote individual performance dashboards. This encourages each sales agent to focus on the key metrics that will help them improve as an agent. This could be the number of dials they are pushing out, for instance, to encourage more calling if an agent is sluggish in reaching out to contacts.

3. Let sales agents know they are running their own microbusiness. While agents are part of a team, giving them a measure of autonomy both builds morale and encourages the creation of sales techniques that work best for an agent’s particular personality. Encourage agents to take control of their sales efforts and both experiment and evolve their techniques based on what they are finding works best.

4. Discuss career goals. While there’s the tendency to avoid discussion of long-term agent career goals, there is no better way to understand an employee than to ask about their plans for the future. This helps the agents feel understood and supported, and also can lead to supporting agents better in their career growth.

5. Ask how you can make the job better. Finally, a good way to improve the effort of your sales team is to ask how the operation can be improved. Simple, yes, but you might be surprised how many managers do not directly ask this simple question. Agents know their needs, and a good way to improve the sales operation is both to create an environment where agents can share their needs, and to support those needs by asking and then acting upon ways to improve the work environment.

Put these practices into place, and watch agents reach more of those sales goals.