Are You Facing Sales Fatigue?

These team building techniques will ensure that your organization will exceed your goals this year and create a culture of high performance. Holding frequent success meetings and instilling passion and belief in your organization can have a huge impact and bring amazing results.

Stress and Fatigue Are Poison for High Performing Sales Teams

The past year has been a challenge for most sales organizations. Sales teams have faced declining budgets, more competitive bidding, fewer opportunities, lower incomes, and heightened stress. Across the board, there has been an increase in mental and physical fatigue.

Sales executives have witnessed increased levels of stress due to managing cash flow, personnel decisions, increased costs, decreased margins. Likewise, personal stressors have caused the same problems to appear. As we face another year, most individuals feel uncertainty about the future. Will it bring a recovering economy or another challenging series of events?

What is the recipe for ensuring your organization exceeds its goals this year and creates a culture of high performance? There are specific team building techniques to ensure your organization remains focused, energized, and mentally tough. It begins with a focus on communication and building belief within your sales team. Sales teams are the critical ingredients in building a total organizational culture of expectations and success.

Monthly Employee Meetings

When a company launches, its first employees typically feel that they share a mission. Everyone knows everything that’s happening and what’s needed to succeed. But when the staff grows beyond about 15 people, that sense of mission, along with clearly defined expectations and common beliefs, can be difficult to maintain. In challenging times, improving communications and establishing a sense of common mission is absolutely imperative.

Keep Everyone Engaged and Informed

Monthly employee meetings are crucial for keeping everyone engaged and informed. Larger organizations and those with remote offices may opt for quarterly day-long events instead, or lock into a Zoom/video conference. Employee meetings give you a chance to remind your staff about your business philosophies, plans, and expectations. This is your opportunity to provide vision, positive expectations, and your roadmap to “better times ahead”.

Introduce Incentives

You can also use them to recognize outstanding employees that contributed to the success of the sales organization, a client’s implementation, or company operations. You may consider honoring a Most Valuable Player chosen by the sales team at each session. This will provide a sense of teamwork and a sense of good business practices.

Fun Meetings Build Strong Teams

Remember to make the meetings fun as well. Creating FUN in your organization and making people want to work hard are two objectives for leaders who understand employee motivation. Consider sponsoring a fun game, competitive contests for sales leads, or even offering simple door prizes. One company meeting I attended featured a surprise visit from an Elvis impersonator, who sang several songs. It is amazing what happens when laughter occurs and the sense of teamwork builds.

Share Your Vision of Success

During your monthly company meetings, share your vision for the next 18-24 months and your philosophy for success. This is your opportunity as a leader to build consensus and ensure you communicate your message to your team. Stay on message, create a theme for the year, reinforce that theme with actions and provide all employees with a sense of direction.  In our sales leadership workshop, we discuss the five styles of leadership. The second style is a “selling” style, and at your company meetings and at other important events, this leadership style is critical. It means you will describe a problem, provide your solution, and sell your employees as to why it is the course of action.

Believe To Achieve

In working with our clients, where sales are lost or the sales team is faltering due to fatigue, the underlying problem is usually an emotional one: a lack of passion. Individual team members or the entire sales organization (or both) simply don’t have the combination of enthusiasm and belief that’s essential for success. They either don’t believe in the products, or they don’t believe in the ability of the organization to successfully deliver quality services.

Emotional Investment

Salespeople have to be emotionally invested in their work with a burning desire to achieve. They must also believe that the company they represent is the best and the solutions or services they sell are of the highest quality. That belief must be genuine. It’s not just a marketing message, and it’s not something that they can fake. It must be real.

Belief-Building Leadership Initiatives

Many sales leaders forget this emotional side of leadership is critical and they don’t integrate belief-building activities into sales training programs. Or if they do, they only do so occasionally. Our experience shows that the most successful sales teams constantly undertake on-going belief-building initiatives.

Storytelling

People from different cultures and generations pass along stories about their ancestries, traditions, and lore. Companies need to take a similar approach to capture and preserve their histories. To do so, write down customer success stories when they occur. Put together detailed descriptions of your company’s role in helping customers implement new technologies, launch or salvage important projects or earn recognition from your vendors. Then share these stories at sales meetings and other employee events. You can also use the best stories to recruit top performers and help orient new employees. We recommend that you record these stories and play them during your monthly company meetings.

Customer Visits

Each quarter, have your entire sales team visit a client’s company that has successfully implemented your solutions. Ask the customer’s executive to describe the impact your company has had on their business, their competitive position or to review the savings they’ve gained from your products and services. You might also invite customers to share their experiences at some of your monthly meetings.

Reference Letters

Ask your best customers for testimonials. While such letters are, of course, highly useful as tools for future sales presentations, they’re also valuable for building belief in-house. Frame the letters and display them in your lobby or sales presentation area. Then, have new employees read them as part of the orientation process.

Build A Culture of Success

In our business, it’s all too easy to get bogged down with lost sales, missed project dates, and other problems. Regularly reinforcing the positives goes a long way toward keeping everyone’s belief and passion strong and moving in the right direction. These team building techniques will foster a culture of success, as well as a sense of mission and common teamwork.

5 Ways to Stay Motivated On Your Way to the Top will help you and your team re-energize and stay focused in any market conditions.