Being a part of a marketing or sales team can be rough—if you’re in marketing, you’re on the front lines, trying to make your company and its products look good. And if you’re in sales, you’re directly responsible for bringing in the greens. 

Naturally, sometimes you get burned out under the weight of all those responsibilities. This is when you need something other than your own conviction to keep you going and keep you clocking in. 

Of course, this isn’t an easy task in and of itself. Different people respond differently to stimuli, and one motivational strategy won’t be effective at bringing up all of your team members. 

That’s why we’re giving you not one, not two, but 10 excellent motivational strategies, tips, and tricks to motivate your sales team. So, if you’re in need of cheering your marketing team up quickly or boosting your sales productivity, check out our little article here, and you might just find one that works!

1 Get to Know Your Team and Build Their Trust

While working with people you don’t know is certainly possible, working with the ones you know on a personal level is much easier. That’s why, as a team leader, you should always strive to get to know your team and encourage them to get to know one another.

By being open and encouraging transparency between teammates, you’re also building trust. And if your people trust you and each other, they’re much more likely to perform better and encourage each other to be more productive. 

Another benefit of getting to know your team is that you know what works for whom. So, if a time comes when somebody (or everybody) is experiencing a slump, you can better apply the techniques you find here to better invest in your team and achieve maximum performance.

2 Build a Team that You Can Trust

The keyword here is “team”.

Without a team, you have a bunch of individuals working separately toward a mutual goal, and that creates an opportunity for absolute chaos. People might talk over each other, work to undermine one another, or simply miscommunicate. 

That’s why, as a team leader, you need to create a sense of unity within your group. Let your people know they’re working together toward a common goal, and the best way they will achieve it is if they work together. 

Thus, you’re creating an opportunity for trust and altruism to flourish. If your team members know they can rely on one another when going gets tough, it will be a massive load off their backs. Moreover, you’re creating a sense of belonging, and your team will work extra hard to not let their comrades down. Hurrah!

3 Set Realistic and Reachable Short-Term Goals

As a team leader, you need to set two goalposts—a long-term, grand goal that you’re looking to accomplish in the long run and a short-term goal that’s both challenging and exciting, whose completion contributes toward completing the long-term one. 

Now, long-term goals are all fine and good, but most of the time, they take a long time to accomplish. When people working toward it barely make a dent after considerable effort, seeing how far they still have to go can be seriously disheartening.

This is why you have to set smaller, piece-meal goals that are much more feasible. People are motivated by success, and if they don’t feel successful enough, they’ll soon become disinterested and listless. 

In order to prevent disinterest and motivate your sales team to keep pushing, you should set up daily, weekly, and/or monthly goals that are far closer and much easier to reach. After all, this strategy is proven to work. In fact, it’s a major key performance indicator for the highest-performing teams in tech—and if they can do it, so can you!

4 Give Plenty of Incentives To Motivate your Workforce

One of the most effective ways to motivate a sales team or a marketing team is to give them all kinds of incentives.

Of course, when we think about incentives, the first thing we think about is monetary compensation. This is a great incentive for sales teams, especially as if they make extra cash for every deal they close, they’ll be additionally motivated to close as many deals as needed. 

However, monetary compensation isn’t the only way you can give out incentives. Opportunities for vertical climbing are also very strong incentives for people to do their job and to do it well. 

At that point, you’re killing two birds with one stone—the opportunity for promotions not only gives your workers something to strive towards but also ensures that you’re getting enough dedicated talent to fill leadership positions in your company. 

But the incentives you’re giving out don’t have to be that grandiose. They could be smaller rewards that, if anything, will make your employees’ lives easier. 

Say you’re in the furniture selling business. One of your marketing teams creates an excellent furniture marketing strategy that results in lots of sales. Why not reward them with some of your inventory in the value of the sales?

Or, if somebody performs well, you can hire a professional cleaning team to come over one weekend and clean their house. 

Alternatively, you can organize babysitting for your top performers. The prospect of having secured a babysitter is sure to make every married employee in your company weak at the knees. 

All in all, if you make sure your employees know that hard work and diligence are rewarded, you’ll have a motivated and incentivized workforce working around the clock to deliver top results around the clock. 

5 Show Your Workforce the Appreciation They Deserve

It might be a small thing, but hearing “good job” every now and again does wonders for a worker’s confidence. A confident worker is, first and foremost, more efficient at their task. Second, they’re more incentivized to keep performing on the same level.

Sadly, a lot of companies forget about this small but highly-appreciated gesture. Many forget that it is the employees that make the company—not the building, the product, or the CEOs. 

The grunts with their feet on their ground make your product and deliver your service. They are on the front lines every day, putting in the hours. 

But, most of all, your employees are people who deserve to be respected and treated as professionals. They have put in the effort and the hours to make themselves what they are today. 

So, if you want to motivate a sales team or give your marketing team a leg up, show them that you appreciate all the hard work they’re putting in. 

Ultimately make sure each and every team member knows that their contribution is important to your business, with a wide array of rewards and recognition ideas.

6 Show Your Team the Fruits of Their Labor

Another way you can motivate your workers and show your appreciation for all the hard work they’ve been doing is to show them the fruits of their own labor.

People are not machines—they cannot work day-in and day out without some kind of gratification. If a person works on something and doesn’t see that they’re making any kind of progress, they’ll soon lose their drive and abandon the ordeal.

This is why you, as a team leader, need to show your employees that they’re making a difference in the ultimate pursuit of your company’s goals, even if they’re progressing little by little. 

Show your team members that their work is appreciated to motivate them to keep pushing. 

One way to show your workers all the work they’ve done is to focus on activity metrics. Working in marketing and/or sales is a capricious business—prospects sometimes simply leave the funnel, and there’s nothing that can be done about that. 

That’s why you have to show your team actionable data, something more tangible than “deal closed” or “deal is off”. Such data-driven company culture promotes efficiency and enables the worker to see their impact, even if what they’re doing is behind the scenes. 

7 Use Gamification to Break the Monotony

Playing games is a great way to get a load off and have some fun—but they don’t have to be limited to your time off!

Games have proven, throughout the years, to be effective methods to both learn and make work more fun. 

A great number of companies, especially smaller startups, like to employ gamification as a tool for team-building and motivation. For example, gamifying something like employee expense reports can be a lifesaver for workers when they complete that dull task. 

Now, a bit of competition is always healthy as it brings out the feisty side of people and makes them more goal-oriented. Still, you need to be careful how you’re implementing your games. 

You don’t want to create a toxic environment where people will work actively to undermine each other. Instead, you want to create an atmosphere where creativity, dedication, hard work, and ingenuity are appreciated, rather than cheating and Machiavellism.

Finally, you don’t want to suffocate your team with an abundance of games. While games are a great way to motivate a sales team to adopt a go-get-em attitude, you’re still running a place of business, and you know what they say—it can’t all be fun and games!

 8 Confront Any Arising Issues Head On

People don’t always perform well. Sometimes, a marketing campaign flops. However, if this happens repeatedly, then you’ve got a problem, and you need to address it. 

Openly.

Most people don’t appreciate it when you talk behind their back. Instead, if you’ve got a consistently underperforming employee, approach them openly and ask them what you can do to help.

Most of the time, that person will open up and tell you why they’re struggling. At that point, you can offer to help them resolve the issue or offer them to be moved to a more fitting position.

If you’re upfront, honest, and earnest about resolving issues, you are much more likely to create an atmosphere of trust among your team. By tackling problems head-on, you signal to your employees that you’re a reliable and helpful asset. You’ll motivate your sales team, or your marketing team, to come to you if they need assistance.

The key element here is to not stigmatize failure. Do not put the person lagging behind on a pillory—instead, promote solidarity and create a nourishing environment in the workplace. 

9 Ask for Peer Evaluation From Your Colleagues

Know that while you’re evaluating your workers, they’re also evaluating you.

Don’t be afraid to take criticism from those who are considered to be beneath your position. As a team leader, you’re as much of a part of the team as anybody else. If you don’t work with your team and lead by example, then you’ve failed.

That is why every decent team leader asks for peer evaluation. By asking your team to evaluate your leadership skills, you’re signaling that you’re not beyond scrutiny. If you do this, your team members will start respecting and trusting you more, making them extra motivated to do good work and not disappoint you.

10 Communication Is the Key to Success

Last but not least, facilitate communication. Not only downward communication, in which you talk to your employees, but also upward and lateral communication.

By establishing clear lines of communication, you’re further promoting trust and equality among your workers. Your team will know that they can approach you or any of their coworkers with a problem and expect help in return. 

This goes all the way back to our point about building a team. Communication is the cornerstone of team-building, and without the ability to talk to each other, you cannot be an effective workforce.

This is even more prominent when it comes to remote teams working from virtual offices. Any communication you have with them is delayed and strained to an extent. However, if you’re diligent enough, you can find a way to boost your remote team’s performance by establishing clear lines of communication at the very beginning of your time together. 

Final Words

And there you have it, ten ways to motivate a sales team or a marketing team. As we mentioned before, sales and marketing can be rough, and things might not always go as planned. After all, sales and marketing work with people, and people can be shifty.

This is why you, as a team leader, need to be ready to offer motivation and support to your team when the going is tough, and you’re guaranteed to create a team that’s both loyal and efficient.