Diana May-Jennings 5 Ways to keep you and your sales reps motivated
Door-to-door sales is an emotional rollercoaster. The thrill of getting a sale is balanced by the frustration of constant rejection. So staying motivated can be a challenge, even for the pros. Here are 5 secret ways to keep the reps you manage, or yourself, more motivated.
Hire Great People, Fire Bad Ones
In Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t, author Jim Collins explains that the best companies in the world “get the right people on the bus.” In other words, if you hire great reps, they won’t need as much hands-on management and will perform better. Finding good reps comes from asking the right questions in interviews.
Conversely, it’s important to fire bad workers. This may seem obvious, but many companies have a hard time making a clean break with lazy, dishonest, or consistently underperforming sales reps.
According to a recent CareerBuilder survey, 41% of companies surveyed say that a bad hire in the last year has cost them at least $25,000. In fact, the ecommerce company Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh offers new hires $2,000 to leave the company, because if they’re only there for the money, they’ll do a terrible job.
Hire slow, fire fast.
How much time and energy are you spending on recruiting grade A reps?
How many six-figure door to door sales reps do you have working for you?
Daily Meetings
It’s imperative to keep up with your daily sales meetings, even if nobody likes them or seems to need them. It’s a great time to get everyone focused and ready for the day. Here’s a few ideas for your morning meetings:
- Share stories of things that happened while you were on the doors
- Play interactive games
- Do training
- Have a quick inspirational message
- Report statistics from the previous day (from your Sales Rabbit app leaderboard)
- Assign areas (paperlessly with the Sales Rabbit app 🙂 )
- Hold competitions and give prizes!
With a door to door sales or canvassing app, you can track more advanced stats than just sales closed. You can hold competitions on our leadership board for the most doors knocked, most presentations made, most leads created, or anything else that you can think of.
Hold Competitions
Commissioned sales reps are a competitive breed! They want to be the best, and they want to outrank their peers. We recommend keeping competitions for short time frames, like daily. At the most, you want it to be weekly. The point is to trigger their desire for immediate gratification, recognition, and praise.
Along those lines, cash and cash cards (like prepaid debit cards or Walmart) don’t usually motivate too well because many reps tend to use them to do responsible things like pay bills or pay off debts. That’s why physical possessions, trips out to eat, and other fun experiences tend to motivate better. Possessions can serve as trophies to look back on with fondness, and experiences, like going out to eat or trips to the shooting range or amusement parks, can foster teamwork and loyalty.
Hold People Accountable
Most people are honest and work hard for their employers, but there’s always going to be people who try to get away with things. That’s why you’ve got to let your sales reps know that there are consequences for not showing up for work, dishonesty or other shady behavior.
That’s why we created GPS tracking as part of our door to door sales app. Managers have the ability to see if reps are in their area when they say they are. Accountability counts!
Dig Deeper
What’s your why? Why do you do door-to-door sales? Why do your employees canvass and sell?
As the diagram below shows, when people are only doing it to pay the bills, that’s a poor motivation. But when your jobs gives you a sense of belonging and importance, you’ll start to give a lot more.
If you feel like you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing in life, then you’re reaching “self-actualisation.” You feel that you’re achieving your purpose, and that you’re helping people.
When you tap into those deep motivations, that’s when you can do incredible things, like work 80 hour weeks and close 10 sales per day. You’re in the flow, and you never want to leave!
Take Aways
- Recruit great people & fire the bad ones
- Have daily meetings
- Hold competitions
- Hold people accountable
- Work for your “why”
What do you do to motivate yourself and your reps?
