Clearly, sales are an important part of any media business’s success, and effective sales begin with skilled and motivated sales team. The first step for motivating your sales team—and ultimately achieving sales success—is to get their perspective on what drives them. One phrase to consider involves the three Ps: People are more Passionate when they are involved in the Process.
Ad sales are the lifeblood of any media enterprise. If you ceases to properly sell your product or service, you will succumb to debt and be labeled unvalued. Of course, most businesses today spend vast amounts of time and effort training salespeople on the ins and outs of their developed sales process, but what does one do to continue improving and gaining momentum after one’s team has mastered the basics? How long is simple monetary gain enough to keep a sales team motivated?
Here are four ways to motivate your ad sales team:
1. Create a motivational survey. The first step for motivating your sales team—and achieving ad sales success is to get their perspective on what drives them. Remember: People are more Passionate when they are involved in the Process. Too often managers abides by their own viewpoint, and sometimes employees’ opinions can get lost in translation. Even with good intentions, bosses often come up with incentives that, while they may seem like a good idea, aren’t important to the individuals they’re trying to inspire. Getting the employees’ perspective on what drives them is a good way to ensure they’ll be motivated. One technique that can be used to ensure an in-depth knowledge of one’s sales team’s motivations is to create a survey asking them for insight about things that inspire them or “others” the most. One wouldn’t guess it, but it turns out that, often, time is the biggest incentive for most salespeople.
2. Hire a motivational speaker. One might wonder why they should hire a motivational speaker, coach or consultant who is simply saying the same thing that they’ve been saying—but the truth is that this tactic works! A good way to think about it is, in this situation, to equate the boss-employee relationship to a parent-child relationship. Parents can tell their child to do something 10 times without success, but often when a stranger or someone else tells them to do the same thing, they’ll do it right away. It’s simply psychology, and the same type of thing happens when those “strangers” are motivational speakers, coaches and experts. It just works.
3. Consider margins for incentives. When looking at margins to decide incentives, it is crucial for one to check one’s highest margin area (where one wants to see the biggest increase) and set bonus plans accordingly. When one has high margins and a great need to fill, they can allot the extra revenue space to their sales team (while providing instant motivation) and consequentially fill that need.
4. Create a group contest. One good strategy is to look for ways in which people aren’t judged by their individual performance but the group is judged overall by their total performance. There shouldn’t be a focus on losses vs. wins; there should just be a focus on wins. For example, if the collective group accomplishes something—say 10 “wins”—everyone receives x, but the person who had the most out of that group gets y. This contest highlights the effort of the group. It could come off unfair in some cases because the weakest link will technically get credit for a group win, but that objection is simply bypassed by giving the top seller another bonus prize. Contest success lies in motivation (after all, that’s why one created the contest in the first place), and if one feels as if he/she is out of the race when other surpass them, their motivation level could potentially drop as a result. But when one is working in a team environment and contributing as part of a group, it allows the group to support each other through hot and cold streaks.
–Ryan Dohrn is an international ad sales training coach with media clients in seven times zones. His passion for radio and television began at WPXR FM and led him to his last post at WLS-TV in Chicago. Now, he is an internationally recognized digital media sales expert and is the founder of 360 Ad Sales Training and Strategy, a boutique revenue consulting firm with a detailed focus on ad sales training, internet consulting and media revenue generation.
Ryan R. Dohrn
President/Founder
360 Ad Sales Training and Strategy
http://360adsales.com
803-867-3769
Follow him on Twitter.com/ryandohrn for daily tips and advice.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/ryandohrn
