Motivate and Incentivize Your Team the Right Way

From Coach Ty Bello:

Motivation is the key when spending time and measuring the performance of your sales people. It is paramount to the overall success of your business. As coaches and managers, we should have ways of showing them where they are at each week, month, quarter and year.
Incentives and commissions must be tied to a behavior. The behavior is simple: we want them to make sales calls. It may seem that you are simply double-paying them to do their job. Look at it another way-this behavior is a precursor to the commission or incentive. The behavior (making sales calls) is tied directly to commission and incentive dollars.
Waving that carrot will motivate sales people to make sales calls-and you can determine the type of call needed. There are two essential types of calls needed-sales calls on the referral base (established customers) and prospect calls (new customers or those not giving the business).
There are three areas for consideration when implementing a salary plan for a sales professional.

• Skill set-including previous experience and past performance
• "Book of business"-what relationships, alliances, and customer base will they bring?
• Geography- what is the MRP (Market Reference Point) for the territory? What are other professionals in your area being paid for that type of sales position?

Reference our article in the March 2009 issue of HME News titled, Move away from Pulse Hiring in Downturn. The market is flooded with solid sales candidates for HME and we need to take this opportunity to perfect our team. I would encourage you all to read this article to identify how you can do this and why the timing could not be better.