Sales Job Motivation

Listen to win Sales

Very few people are good listeners. In your everyday life how many people can you remember who are good listeners, people who remembered your name or what you said. In fact you would have met a couple of people in recent weeks you thought were good listeners, What were your feelings towards these people. I am sure you have more Trust, Confidence and Faith in them. Most of us find it very hard to listen.

Salespeople think of themselves as being good talkers instead of Listeners. You hear people saying, ‘He is a born Salesman’. He has the gift of gab. Kerry Johnson in his book ‘Mastering the Game’ says many people believe that speech is power and that listening is subservient. He believes a good listener has much more power in a Conversation. The listener is able to get more information than the talker. When two people are talking, the person who dominates the conversation is the person who is asking the questions and listening. The job of the salesperson is to listen to his customers. Most successful salespeople will agree.

Qualities of a good listener

1. Repeat and Clarify Information

2. Exchange Information.

3. Listen to Emotions.

4. Always be Alert and Attentive.

5. Never distract the Customer while talking.

Listening is an essential skill for making and keeping relationships. Once you are a good listener people confide in you and trust you. Listening with Openness is very important. When you are face to face with the Customer you have to do the following

1.Maintain good eye contact.

2.Paraphrase.

3.Clarify by asking questions.

4.Concentrate.

5.Keep away from distraction.

6.Be Committed.

As a mentor and motivational speaker, I teach people key principles that work to generate wealth for themselves over and over again. I believe anyone who has the desire can start a motivational speaking career especially when they have the right tools and knowledge right in their hands. Here are six things you can do to get those public speaking jobs and experience professional speaking success!

1) Know who you want to target as a market and determine your affinity within this market. Will their audience like what you have to say? Who do you relate to and what’s your message? Research your target market and see what kinds of products they purchase, what kinds of information sells in these niches, and lastly, review whether or not your materials match what you niche buys.

2) You would also want to know your competition in your niche. What are they selling and how are they doing it? (Motivational speaking tip: Never be afraid to learn from someone else.) Research is really important. As you discover how to get bookings for motivational speaking gigs, you’ll find that you’ll have a much easier time selling yourself when you know what your niche wants.

3) Create your marketing materials. When starting a motivational speaking business, get this part out the way first so you can have time to focus on marketing yourself. The easiest thing to start with is to write a book on something that you want to speak on. Pull from things that you have experience with. If you have a speech, write it down. Solve a niche problem and then create a workbook program or an audio / video training program that solves that problem. Sometimes, the market may choose you. Conference planners may tell you what they need and if you can meet those needs with your materials. Research your niche and see if there are any speakers that target what you’re targeting.

4) Decide if you are going to promote yourself over a topic as you go after public speaking jobs. If you’re wondering why you would want to promote a topic over yourself, the main reason is so that you can train other motivational speakers to do your talk. Your speakers can speak for a lower fee or you can collect a booking fee from them. Sometimes thought, a company will want only you.

5) Develop a unique selling point (USP) for yourself. Why should conference organizers hire you? You have to have a hook as you develop your motivational speaking career. Your hook may not necessarily be a physical characteristic but it is a personal branding that will help people to remember who you are.

6) Develop a marketing plan and market heavily to your niche. Consider putting together a marketing package that lets people know who you are. Include your biography, a photo, a demo clip (audio or video), price sheet of your product for sale, testimonials and possibly even a sample client list. Get all of your marketing materials finished and then market, market, market! If nobody knows about you, they can’t book you!

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Each salesperson is an individual. Personal working styles and ways of dealing with challenges are sometimes quite dissimilar, nevertheless, there are certain basic types. You can increase the effectiveness of staff motivation by deploying your salespeople according to their type. Motivation therefore is a core subject on all good management courses. By successfully classifying each member of the sales team, it is easier to find the right person for each job. Maximize effectiveness and classify!

The Practician

Likes sensibly standardized procedures and practical details. Products and services that he puts together and sells will certainly be useful to the purchaser.

Provide the necessary means to optimise his systems. Let him know his precise sales results, what he contributes to the business and be clear about aims and objectives. Avoid disrupting his working pattern.

The Introvert Salesperson

He is diligent, and does not cause sensations and does not require continuous updates or interaction with different people. He develops knowledge of his products and services down to the last detail.

Keep trouble away from him. Give him tasks in which his strengths come into play: detailed knowledge, the ability to work on his own, and concentration on a task. He needs praise – but not publicly. He values being informed in detail by his boss about the background to his tasks.

The Extrovert Salespeople

His interests are wide-ranging and he communicates actively with those around him. He does not like to spend too long dealing with one task or activity, detailed knowledge is not a virtue for him.

Do not give him long-term projects. Instead give him short to medium-term tasks in which he has to deal with people are more suitable.

Express your appreciation or positive customer feedback to him in front of his colleagues sometimes as this is important to him.

The Intuitive Sales person

He is similar to the Extrovert. He likes change and the grand gesture, not detail. He has a thirst for action, but cannot accept standardized activities in sales. Make use of his creativity when developing new sales strategies. Assign him to intellectually demanding projects. Allow him to experiment and to see across the demarcation lines.

Emotional type of Salesperson

He values a good working atmosphere and harmony in the team. He wants to be useful to other people and has a pronounced sense of justice. This person is ideally suited to a position in customer service or after sales support. He is very good at managing customers that demand high levels of personal contact and service.

Show him your esteem and support his work. When holding sales competitions, give preference to team oriented models which do not strain the atmosphere in his group.

The Rationalist The Thinker His decisions are based on pure facts, not on moods or feelings.

Like the Practician, he needs honest feedback about his level of performance. He would like recognition to be according to objective, intelligible criteria. Goals and objectives set for this type can be challenging but must be attainable. This is an area that managers are particularly interested in when attending management courses.

The Bureaucratic type of Sales people

He gathers all the relevant facts together and pronounces his judgment – black or white. Inflexibility is a virtue to him, he calls it loyalty to one’s principles.

He likes a manageable, well-ordered working environment. Keep uncertainty, changes and unresolved problems away from him. He is renowned for his 100% appropriate, flawless offers when requirements are specified precisely.

The Spontaneous Salesperson

He is spontaneous, flexible and has a healthy, realistic outlook. If necessary, he will willingly also concern himself with details. Official routine is a dead end for him.

Break up his routine with special tasks or extra duty assignments. Remain accessible to him and distance him from official routine. Do not impose any self-organization methods on him, they would just slow him down.

Average type of Sales person

He is not usually attention seeking and he does not normally have a great deal of ambition. A consistent working environment without big changes is one he likes the most. His success usually comes for being around for a long period of time and is therefore well known to his customers.

Make the working environment enjoyable and encourage a competitive spirit with the sales team.

These sales people are perfect for looking after customers where there are constant targets, and that rarely incur big challenges or problems.

People respond much better in an environment that suits their working style. Therefore by identifying the personality type, and meeting their working requirements, you can maximize business performance through high levels of sales team motivation. Motivation skills can also be further developed by receiving training on management courses.

Every successful sales professional at some time in their sales career have had to deal with failures and overcome sales barriers. A sales barrier is anything that prevents a salesperson from attaining desired sales goals. It may be something major over which there can be no control such as loss of a sales job, a family adversity or losing a big sale order due to unforeseen events. It ca also be something minor over which there can be control such as procrastination, lack of motivation or a bad habit.

How can you expect to be successful in sales without facing obstacles and having failures? Overcoming obstacles is the means by which growth and development tales place. If you willingly accept your failures and learn from them then you will avoid making those same mistakes again. Sales barriers are really stepping stones to achieving success in sales and should not bee seen as negative or failure indicators. If failure occurs then let go of shattered goals and embrace new ones.

An excellent strategy in overcoming barriers in sales is to gain support and learn from other people who have faced similar barriers. These sales professionals can provide proven methods that actually work and even be a great resource to draw upon. Try to gather their input and feedback on failure. Often times our sales superiors will be able to provide quality feedback on what you are doing and suggest specific changes in your sales presentation.

You may have heard the phrases ’setbacks into comebacks’, ‘adversity into opportunities’ and ‘failures into success. Such phrases can all be used to describe overcoming sales barriers and are quite dramatic. To obtain desired results one also need to be optimistic and have a strong belief in one’s ability to succeed in spite of any barrier that may present itself in the selling process.

Finally, the intensity of your desire to overcome sales barriers and be successful in sales combined with how badly you want to attain your goals will create a positive impact.

Give Your Self A Pep Talk:

Now is the time to think positive. Thoughts are funny things. They jump in and out of our minds, like raindrops, seeming to descend from nowhere only to vanish back into nothing.

But raindrops, like thoughts, hardly ever travel alone. And by looking at many of them, we can tell a great deal about the future. One or two, felt on a hot summer day, might mean nothing more than a sprinkling. If a few more show up, we might start to hope for a refreshing afternoon shower. But if enough of them arrive with speed and force, we know that a storm is coming.

Over time, storms grow into weather patterns that lead to enormous changes in our world. Viewed in this light, raindrops deserve more of our respect. After all, they can turn a dusty, barren wasteland into a thriving mixture of fresh life just by showing up.

Your thoughts are no different. Whatever you want to be – in sales or in life – is going to be dependent on what your thoughts shape you into. If your thoughts are lifeless, if they lack passion and excitement, then your career will be the same. But if they bring you energy and purpose, nourishing and encouraging you, then you can’t help but find your way to the top.

Selling is a mental marathon. No single stride seems that important, but by putting some extra effort into every one of them we out-perform our competition and become rainmakers.

Consider the following seventeen positive thoughts and ideas as your daily warm-up run. Read through them once or twice a day until they become a part of your own way of thinking. You’ll find that once you do, your success is inevitable as a change in the weather.

17 Positive Sales Thoughts and Ideas:

You have to have fun in sales. You can’t prosper in this job unless you truly enjoy it. Set your goal to sell to the highest level of an organization. Great salespeople don’t need to be motivated by their managers. Stay focused and remembers it’s all in the details. You can’t make someone buy from you. You must be in the position to help them when they want to buy. Take the time to develop great sales habits early in your sales career. Ask your customers intelligent questions and jot them down on a clean sheet of paper. Associate with top producers and other successful people. It will accelerate your path to sales success. Money is just a by-product of doing what you enjoy. Concentrate on selling and the money will follow. Add some body language to your presentations. You’ll seem more energetic and make more sales. Hold eye contact and give your customer your full attention. They will reward you by buying something. Spend your time finding out who has the power to make a decision before you launch into a presentation. Big sales are great, but don’t forget the little ones that keep that cash register ringing. Stay away from negative people. I’m pretty positive about that. If you fall down, stand up. Keep doing this until you stop falling down. People usually believe what others say about you more than they believe what you say about yourself. Encourage others to sell you. Prospecting will get customers into your sales funnel. Servicing will keep them buying.
Sales Management Point:

If your thoughts are lifeless, if they lack passion and excitement, then your sales career will be the same. But if they bring you energy and purpose, nourishing and encouraging you, then you can’t help but find your way to the top.

Bonus Thought:

I still believe that success is when opportunity and preparation meet. Your big break my come today, be ready.

Printed pens, promotional mugs and other sales incentive items can play a key role in setting the tone for your promotional sales meetings. When you use promotional items like printed pens, t-shirts and other items to reinforce the main message of your sales meetings, you’ll see results that you never dreamed possible.

Motivating your sales force can be a full time job in itself. When you manage a team of sales people, a major part of your income is derived from how well you motivate them to sell. Pumping up your sales team requires more than just picking out prizes for them to earn. The key to motivating your sales team is to excite them and keep them excited about your products, their efforts and being a part of your team.

One of the best ways to pump up the excitement among your team is with regular sales meetings designed to recognize their hard work, introduce new sales techniques and products and raise their level of commitment to the team. Motivational meetings are a cornerstone of inspiring your team to sell more. Daily contact with your sales team is important, and so is the personal pat on the back. Motivational sales meetings take sales management to the next level, and can help you send your sales team’s profits soaring through the roof. Motivational sales meetings provide you with the opportunity to:

- Build product and customer knowledge

- Demonstrate new sales techniques

- Sharpen and perfect their listening skills (an essential sales skill!)

- Improve their sales presentations

- Energize and boost their self confidence

Your sales force should leave the meeting re-energized, with new skills and new commitment to your products and your company. Organizing a successful sales meeting is a matter of logistics. It’s the little things that can make a big difference in the overall effect. Here are seven tips for using motivational sales meetings to pump your sales force to new heights of excitement.

1. Choose a meeting focus. Is your goal to increase sales of a particular product, increase overall sales, introduce a new product? Pick one, and focus on it.

2. Create a marketing message just as you would to sell to the public. Remember, before you can sell your product, you have to sell your people.

3. Give your message a slogan to create a theme for the meeting.

4. Choose a memorable venue.

5. Reinforce your meeting theme. Put your slogan on printed pens to hand out at the door, balloons to float in the meeting hall and streamers to hang across the front of the room. The more ways that your message gets across, the more it will stick in the minds of your people.

6. Build workshops that focus on educating and motivating. Include presentations, role playing and other techniques that make the event multi-sensory.

7. Send your employees home with your message. Make sure that every one of your sales staff goes home with a great stash of promotional items. Pack goodie bags with printed pens, car stickers, mint tins and one or two special goodies – and hand them out at checkout instead of check-in to give them maximum impact and extend the excitement all the way home and beyond.

For more information visit the leading online promotional gifts and items suppliers today!

Leadership is Motivation, the Leader is a Motivator

We’re not talking about the kind of motivator who arrives and excites everyone and then leaves. That is not motivation. Real motivation lasts longer than twenty-four hours. Real motivation is the key to effective leadership, and leadership is the key to effective motivation.

When organizations establish quotas for their sales teams, they should involve their sales people in the process of the setting of their targets.

Effective sales managers give their teams, an overview of the full picture and what the company is trying to achieve. Then, they work with each person to establish individual targets that will meet or exceed the corporate objectives.

Every target must be specific and detailed, then, your people can visualise its outcome. Make the target important to the person who is responsible for achieving it, if not, they may lose interest, particularly if it is a longer term objective.

Targets should have a good chance of being achievable while still challenging the individual to push themselves beyond their existing comfort zone. Each target must be relevant to the main objective of the organisation and relevant to the overall success of the company.

Set a time frame and deadline for each target and ensure the deadline is realistic but, at the same time, challenging.

Work with your team members to help them determine the targets that would be most appropriate for their development and growth and work with them to develop the appropriate action steps to achieve these targets and you will see a noticeable improvement in their performance

Communicate and tell your team what is happening, sales people are hungry for information and from my experience, can be trusted with company details. Unfortunately, too many corporations and their middle managers feel that people should only be given information that is relevant to their specific job.

Keep them aware of the progress you are making in achieving your targets, people are naturally curious and want to know how they are doing. Do not reveal confidential information, but share information about the overall status of the company.

If sales are down and you need your people to focus on generating new accounts or business then tell them. If costs are climbing then advise your employees that they need to be aware of their expenses.

Regular update meetings, email correspondence, broadcast voice mails are just some of the ways you can communicate with your team. Another effective method is through casual discussions.

Communication must be clear and concise, employees want to know where they stand and, all but a few, want to do a good job. They want to know how, you, as their manager, view their performance. That’s why it is critical that you give them direction and feedback on a regular basis.

Experience has taught me that people will work harder for someone who praises them and recognises the effort they put into their work. Acknowledge their energy and performance, their effort and commitment, how hard they worked and how involved they were with it.

Your sales people have a lot of knowledge and information and can often contribute valuable suggestions to improve the business. If you really want to create a team of highly motivated sales people take the time to listen to their comments and ideas.

Foster an environment that encourages the open sharing of information. Great leaders are always open to new ideas and methods of improving business and some of the best ideas come from the customer facing employees.

This last point is the most important. If you want a highly motivated sales team, then you must lead by setting the example. You must demonstrate enthusiasm, energy, team cooperation, honesty, integrity and commitment.

Treat people with respect and dignity, give them the tools to excel, grow and develop and encourage them to participate and get involved. Ask them for feedback, listen to their comments, and act on suggestions that will help your business succeed.

Set and communicate high standards, provide positive reinforcement when your team members perform and involve them. You will soon see a team that will do almost anything to help you succeed.

What image comes to mind when you hear the word “motivational speaker”? If you are like most individuals you will see a person speaking impassioned to an audience persuading them to seize the day. While this may be good advice today’s motivational speakers have upped the ante in regards to connecting and communicating with an audience. Many people are not aware that modern speakers no longer simply feed positive message but also impart much useful and specialized information. All this is wrapped in a presentation intended to both entertain and inform.

A skilled motivational speaker can be an excellent resource when a productivity boost is needed. By helping people understand how they think it is possible to provide individuals with the insight necessary to improve. Those in the creative elements of an industry can learn new methods of self-reflection and see their function in a new artistic light. Even management can benefit by gaining a better understanding of the workers which they must lead.

The purpose of motivational speaking is to provide inspiration at its simplest level. A great speaker can go so much further. Insight into yourself, human nature and culture could all be considered a part of the orator’s profession. Motivational speaking even has a storied past that goes back in history. Legends such as Mark Twain often made their living doing speaking engagements while sharing their knowledge. If a company is missing something that is hard to describe in its culture than a professional speaker can help.

If one’s business needs to improve its performance in regards to something such as sales a business development course is always an option. A strong motivational speaker can teach you the why people buy and the how to persuade them of the importance of the product. Understanding this psychological component is critical to developing a successful company and taking one’s shares to the next level. This can be done by teaching skills ranging from speaking to listening to communicating.

These days are economically uncertain times. In the past several years more businesses are streamlining and employees fear for their jobs. Motivational speakers can give you a competitive edge in teaching workers how to perform and help them be secure in their employment. This increases productivity and directly ties into running a successful business. If your company is in need of improved performance than a talented motivational speaker is an excellent option.

What Are Goals?

They aren’t your dreams or wants, the ultimate rewards for your hard work. No, goals are where the rubber meets the road; they are the maps of the terrain, the way to use your work to get to the things you really want. They’re a bridge between the present and the future. For that reason, I like to take a bit of a different approach to goals. Rather than think about what it is you want to do, or are expected by your sales manager to do, I’d encourage you to work backwards. That is, start with those dreams you thought so much about, and are working so hard to nurture. Whether it’s a quiet place in the country, a portfolio stuffed with blue chip investments, or that luxury car, picture the thing you’ve set your heart on having. What will it take for you to reach your dream? More specifically, how much money will you need to earn, and how soon? These figures, transformed into meaningful targets, are a big part of the process, so if you don’t know, find out. Search online, talk to a salesperson, visit a dealer – do whatever you have to do to find out what you’re really going to need. Once you have, write that number at the top of a piece of paper. This is going to be the dollar amount that you need to raise in order to reach your dream. Whether it’s ten dollars, ten thousand, or ten million isn’t the point; knowing what you’re aiming for is. It’s important to point out that right now isn’t the time to be reasonable. If your ultimate dream is to buy Private Island that costs fifteen million dollars, and that’s what you really want out of life, then write it down.

What Are Motivational Goals?

A good motivational goal is any one that drives you forward, so now is no time to censor your wishes. Next, attach a time line to your goal. Decide how long you think it should take you to reach. This is an area where common sense should come into play. If you’re deeply in debt, then buying a Ferrari next week is probably going to be next to impossible. On the other hand, never set your dreams so far out that it feels like you’re never going to reach them. A dream that’s too far into the future isn’t all that motivating; you need something that’s going to compel you to work today. This is where the working backwards part comes into play. Take that dream, and the price tag you attached to it, and divide by the number of years or months you want to reach it in. As an example, your dream might be a beach house that costs half a million dollars, and you’d like to buy it within ten years. You now know that you need to save fifty thousand dollars per year. This becomes your intermediate goal. How many new accounts will you have to open in order to meet that figure? If you know, write it down. If you don’t, find someone who does, or make your best estimate. Every industry and territory are a bit different, but the chances are good that you or your sales manager has calculated the average value of each of your accounts (which is helpful information for you to know anyway), so you can use that to get pretty close to an exact figure. From there, you just have to figure out how many calls, letters, appointments, or other activities you’re going to have to generate to find those new clients. For instance, let’s say that you sell industrial equipment and supplies, and that your average new client nets you $2,500 in commissions. Certainly, you’ll have bigger orders and smaller ones, but you’ve calculated that most of them will come in somewhere around that number. From that basis, you can infer that you’ll need to find twenty new customers – about one every two and a half weeks – if you’re going to meet your goals. If you know that you need to call on five prospects to get one appointment, and that for each five you meet, you’ll typically close one into new business, then you can say with confidence that you’re going to have to make five hundred calls (since it takes twenty-five to find a new client) in order to reach your goal. Could you make ten calls a week to achieve your greatest dream? Would you make twenty, or even fifty?

Are They Truly Motivational Goals?

If you wouldn’t, then one of two things is probably happening. In the first case, you might just not be cut out for sales. This is a field where the truly self-driven succeed, and if the idea of having what you want most in life won’t compel you to find new business, then there probably isn’t anything that will. That being said, it’s more likely you just haven’t found whatever it is that you really want yet. For whatever reason, either because you haven’t thought about it long enough, or you’re afraid to admit to yourself what you really desire, you’ve just failed to hit on your true motivator. Once people find their passion in life, and the way to get to it, they tend to be relentless in their pursuit. So, if your dream doesn’t give you the urge to sell, it’s probably just not the right one for you. Remember, your goals are just going to be daily, weekly, and quarterly targets that carry you to your dream – make sure they’re leading you somewhere you actually want to go.

“Pop Icon, what’s going on with you? I really notice a difference in your attitude?”

I responded, “In what way?”

“You seem so calm, so attentive, articulate and just so with it! Before you were like a radio with its antenna half down, but now your antenna has been pulled up beyond imagine. You’re alive. You’re different. Your supercharged!”

After I heard this I knew that I was doing something right. My plan worked and my transformation of my attitude and overall well-being is in process. What am I doing or what have I done to create such a transformation not only in my attitude, but in my incremental sales volume? My transformation began in my car. Yes, in my car!

You see I’m always on the road from one sales appointment to the next and years ago, I was what you would call a “channel switcher”. This means that you constantly search through every station till you find the right one. This in my opinion was unproductive. At that time, as I was driving, I began to think about how I could make better use of my time in the car? Yes, I did enjoy listening to the radio in the car, but it wasn’t doing anything for me. It wasn’t working for me. The music was passive enjoyment and it was forgotten as soon as I shut the door. I wanted something more memorable and I wanted to be perceived as being more memorable.

I wanted something more from my monotonous and daily driving escapades. One day, however, I realized exactly what I was missing? It was a missing link in my life and I’m about to reveal to the world my hidden performance secret, are you ready? It’s not phony, it’s real and it works.

That missing link was in the form of a motivational CD. And today, I keep all different types of motivational and inspirational CDs in my car. In fact, I even have a box of them in my car and I’m always switching old CDs out and replacing them with fresh and new CDs. Periodically, I’ll even listen to a single CD more than once to make sure that I didn’t miss anything the first time around.

Some of my favorites speakers include Anthony Robbins, Dale Carnegie and Zig Ziglar. As I listen to these tapes, I’m learning how much my positive attitude affects how my prospects think and behave. And as a result, I’m finding that I’m closing sales quicker and closing more of them. Have you ever thought about the transformational power of motivational and inspirational CD’s? If not, what do you have to lose by trying something new?

Copyright 2009 Mr. Cold Call, Inc. – All rights reserved.