Building a sales team isn’t just about closing deals and hitting numbers. It’s about building a confident sales team that feels motivated and capable.

Try these six ways to motivate your sales team to help them reach the desired goals and keep up the morale all semester. 

Make success visible 

Try creating visual representations of progress and success to keep around the office or newsroom. This will help your sales team to gauge where they are in sales that semester and motivate them to start or keep reaching the goals.

This could be as simple as a tally-marking system on a whiteboard or poster board, or you could get creative and make a progress-tracking system with craft paper to hang on the wall. 

Keep track of daily goals

Along with keeping track of progress towards larger goals with visual tools, you might try keeping track of everyday goals, like client meetings and prospect outreach. 

For example, you could use the daily 8,5,2 rule - 8 emails, 5 phone calls, 2 deals - and keep track of your team’s progress using the same visual representation methods. This will help your team stay on track from the moment they walk into the office for the day to when they log out for the weekend. 

Celebrate every win

As an advisor or sales manager, or even as a sales rep to your peers, it’s important to celebrate every win loudly whether it’s in the group chat, when they enter the office or in team sales meetings.

Celebrate wins like: 

• Closing a deal
• Booking a meeting with a prospect client 
• Getting out into the community to visit clients
• Meeting a sales goal

This will not only motivate that person to continue meeting goals, but can also signal to other sales reps that they can do it as well. 

Incentivize team accomplishments

If you want your team to meet the desired goals or accomplish more wins, offer an incentive for the action. 

Incentives could be: 

• Pizza parties
• Piece of team merch
• Gift cards
• A coffee or treat
• Bonuses  (if available)
• A day off

Support your team

You shouldn’t ask your team to do anything that you wouldn’t do yourself. If your team is feeling nervous or overwhelmed, try asking them where you can support them. 

For example, if your sales rep is feeling nervous about visiting a local business, go with them. This way you can jump in to help or help make an introduction if it’s a client you have worked or spoken with before. 

Set achievable goals 

In sales, it’s easy to feel stressed and frustrated at dead ends and clients ghosting left and right. Students are also juggling multiple other commitments and priorities and may have limited time in their weeks.

Setting achievable goals is important to keep your students from feeling like they are drowning or overwhelmed. No one feels motivated when they aren’t hitting the goals, no matter how hard they try. 

So, try starting with smaller, achievable goals at the beginning of the semester and gauging what your team is capable of doing before increasing the goals. 

What’s next?

You’ve got this! Try testing out these six methods and see how your team reacts. If you would like additional support, don’t hesitate to reach out to your account manager.