Posts Tagged ‘Sales Management Training’

My wife told me to do it. As many of you know, I have two young boys. Not unlike some of my former sales reps, they oftentimes lack the motivation needed to do the necessary tasks that will help them to achieve success. For my boys, its doing their math homework, getting excited about school, reading on their own, taking out the trash, the list goes on… If you have kids, I’m sure you have the very same issues. So for the last three months, my wife’s been hounding me to watch a DVD she borrowed called “The Motivation Breakthrough: 6 Secrets to Turning On the Tuned-Out Child” by educator Richard Lavoie. On the cover, Lavoie claims to have “proven and effective strategies for encouraging any child to learn and achieve success”. Although it took me three months of do so, I finally watched it a few nights ago. Despite my extreme skepticism, I was totally shocked…it was unbelievable. His research and ideas on motivation really hit home with me. He claims that if a parent or teacher can identify a child’s motivational style – then gear their interactions with them based on those motivations – then the child can achieve consistent success. Lavoie’s research proves that in order to really motivate the child, you need to first uncover their primary motivations…(if you’ve been a regular reader of this blog, does this sound a little bit familiar?) To motivate you need to find out if the child is:

• motivated by power?
• prestige?
• praise?
• contact with other people?
• projects?
• prizes?

Lavoie explodes some common myths about motivation and demonstrates that rewards, punishment and competition are not the effective motivational tools most people tout. Lavoie explores each motivational style in depth, and presents proven techniques, strategies and scripts that can be used either in the classroom or at home to break through a child’s apathy and inspire him to achieve. Although they are not children (even though they may act that way at times), motivating your sales force is no different. Watching this DVD reinforced a very important concept in that in order to motivate them effectively a sales manager needs to know what actually motivates them. And this information is easy to get. So easy, that all you have to do is ask for it. For example, if you try to motivate one of your sales reps with prizes…but they’re actually motivated by prestige…then you’re barking up the wrong motivational tree (so to speak). We train sales managers to ask “the Ten Questions” to get this information. Its simple. Just ask the questions, then use the answers to motivate…what could be more simple? To get “the ten questions” as well as a bunch of other great sales training and motivational techniques, get your own copy of our free ebook. What do you think? How are motivating kids and sales reps the same or different? We’d love to know! Post a comment below.

Do your sales managers struggle with motivating their sales teams?

It’s easier to do than you might think. Sometimes motivating a sales rep is even easier than motivating a five-year

This sneaky little tip is one that I copped off a behavioral modification book I was reading to learn how to discipline my two kids a bit better. So of course, after I used it on them – I tried it on my sales reps…and even though I shouldn’t have been surprised…it worked like a charm.

This sales training tip is called: “Give ‘em a LOFTY reputation to live up to…(even if they’ve done nothing to deserve it)”.

Terrible title…but effective technique.

Anyway, here’s how it works: Say a sales rep is trying to desperately to figure out some kind of relatively complex issue. So the extremely helpful sales manager really want to help them figure it out. They may know the answer and see them struggling…wanting desperately to tell them exactly what to do.

The real “pro” sales managers don’t do it though.

Instead of actually doing the work for them and telling them what to do, the excellent sales managers says this instead: “You know, (name) you’re the expert here, I KNOW you can figure this out on your own”…she then walks away.

Yes, walks away.

Let the rep figure it out. That’ right, let them figure it out. Your sales managers will be shocked at what will happen without them being there.

Now, of course, they’ll need to follow up with the salesperson the next day or within a period of time that they feel is appropriate to make sure it was done…

The point is this: the sales manager is training them to use THEIR brain…not THE SALES MANAGER’S brain.

Here’s why this is a highly effective motivational technique: when people are empowered to control their own destiny, they are far more motivated to control that destiny.

Because a sales manager cannot be around his reps every second of every day, micro managing their salespeople…or worse yet, baby-sitting them, the sales rep has got to learn to do it on their own!

When a sales manager does this, it empowers the salesperson…and motivates them BIG TIME.

The great thing is by using this technique the sales managers both motivates…AND lets themselves off the hook…less work for the sales manager!

To learn even more about sales manager training, get our free ebook.

Post a reply to this post and tell me what do you think? Get in the discussion below!