How do we keep our teams motivated and accountable?
As a sales leader, you might need your team to start filling the top of the funnel. Or, as a business owner, you need to ensure that your team is also executing some key business initiatives or even for yourself to get things done.
So how do we keep our teams motivated and accountable? And how do we do that for ourselves?
I have some thoughts on that after getting my son and husband to shovel our driveway. We just got dumped in snow here in Maine. Over 8 inches in a matter of 24 hours. I needed to get our driveway shoveled before it all froze and turned into a complete block of ice. ASAP.
Now, they weren't too happy about it, even though they knew it needed to be done --This may be how you or your team feels about buyer research or prospecting.
So how do you motivate them to do the things they need to do?
Did you know that data from two million sales professionals showed that those with personal goals written down, shared with others, and held accountable made those salespeople 298% more likely to be top salespeople? The best of the best.
But let's call out the elephant in the room. Quotas.
Quotas are about as motivating and exciting as getting up eager to pay your taxes and student loans in the morning. Yes! No.
Thankfully, I knew what motivated my husband and son, and I strategically placed that motivation at certain intervals throughout the driveway.
So these milestones became accountability cues for them to hold each other to. Both of them got the reward at that point when they had both reached the milestone.
Before I knew it, they were cheering each other on, and the entire driveway was cleared!
And you can do the same for yourself and your team. If you're a manager or a leader, ask your team members during your reviews:
- What are their personal goals?
- What does meeting quota mean for them?
- What does it allow them to do in their life?
Now you may find, as I do when I work with coaching clients, that their personal goals or their quota, as I like to call it, is much higher than the company quota. Then work with them to develop what their plan is to get there.
- What skills do they need to develop?
- What mindsets are holding them back?
- And when do they need to see these results in order to hit their personal goals?
Then have them report their progress with you regularly in your one-to-one meetings.
Encourage your team members to share their goals with each other so that, like my husband and son, they cheer each other on –keeping each other motivated and accountable.
Small Business Owner Benchmark
Now, if you're a business owner, selling on your own without a team to support you is challenging, so I'm partnering with Data Box. To create a sales benchmark for small B2B business owners who sell.
You see, all of the benchmark data that's out there right now on the web is for big companies with big sales organizations. But we, small B2B business owners, we're different. We rarely sell through outbound cold calling and prospecting. We rely heavily on referrals and introductions from our partners and our clients.
And, well, our marketing, for the most part, we do it sporadically in between trying to sell and deliver to the clients we're working with.
So even though selling is our most important activity, it's often the least important thing that we do in our minds. Being that everything else is so much more important. So it's unfair to compare us as business owners with much bigger companies.
We need our own benchmark. Plus, Databox makes it so easy to create free and anonymous benchmarking literally in seconds. If that's something that you're interested in, check out the button below.
If you've enjoyed these tips and found them working with your team, please share this post with others in your organization or other small business owners who you know would also find them beneficial.
So stay motivated in 2023! And until next time, keep learning, and keep sharing out there.
