Categories: Sales Leadership | Talent Management | Economic Change
Economic challenges can take a huge toll on workforce morale. Your sales force is likely encountering obstacles they haven’t faced before, and it’s possible that’s affecting their ability to win.
Not only does low morale impact your organization’s overall momentum, it has the potential to send your top talent looking for greener pastures. It’s critical to keep your sales force feeling supported and considered during this time in order to keep the momentum you need to drive toward your organization’s revenue goals.
How can you motivate your sales force and increase their ability to cut through economic noise? We’re sharing 3 strategies for leaders:
1. Communication & Transparency
As leaders, we might prefer to put on a strong face during challenging times, believing that sharing a message of unity will reflect that in our organization. However, this may not be the best approach. According to Gartner, 67% of sellers feel that their leadership is overly optimistic and disconnected from their day-to-day reality. That kind of disconnect is what may lead your top talent to jump ship, seeking a place where they feel more understood.
Here are a few actions you can take as a leader to communicate more effectively with your sales force:
- Get realistic. Don’t sugarcoat the situation. Communicate where your organization stands and detail your plan to move forward.
- Lead from the front. Take clear accountability and get visibly involved in your team’s success. Give "the why” behind leadership actions.
- Get on the seller level. Spend the time to find out what challenges are arising in your seller’s day-to-day sales conversations, and use that to inform your strategy.
- Chart the path forward. Clearly communicate expectations, goals and indicators of success to help managers assess and course correct more quickly.
These leadership actions don’t just present the façade of alignment; they do the hard work to get there. As a result, your strategy will be more impactful because every member of your team is fully bought into the vision. You will create a culture of personal accountability, which in turn will drive morale, retention, and ROI for your strategy efforts.
2. Resources & Tools
Many leaders are so focused on developing new sales strategies that they neglect to put equal effort into what comes after they unveil an initial strategy. Supporting sellers with great enablement and implementation is key to their individual success and the success of your organization.
As you develop and update your strategy to reflect changing customer needs, consider providing the following resources to help sellers communicate that updated value:
- Content and proof points. Updated slides, website content and success stories provide your sellers with opportunities to insert value into the customer’s buying process.
- Qualification tools. Documenting the markers of a great deal using a qualification framework like MEDDICC can help sellers consistently close high-value opportunities.
- Deal technology. As sellers navigate more complex deals, deal technology like Opportunity Manager® can help them record and analyze deal data to achieve repeatable success.
Great enablement tools allow sellers to clearly see the path to wins, helping them sell more confidently and have better compensation potential. Not only will this help underperformers level up but ensures your top performers don’t feel weighed down, boosting overall revenue potential for your organization.
3. Skills & Coaching
Economic challenges call for a higher level of competency in sales fundamentals. Great coaching is what will elevate those skills to elite levels. An investment in skills and coaching is a vote of confidence in your organization’s talent, one that will increase loyalty to your organization and enable greater wins.
Here are a few key areas to invest:
- Reinforce key skills. Identify and invest in the skills that sellers need to cut through the noise in a challenging sales environment, such as value negotiation, deep discovery, and finding champions.
- Coach the coaches. Invest in your managers’ ability to not just inspect, but to coach sellers toward bigger wins and repeatable success. Identify what wins, and ensure managers are coaching against those examples.
When you invest in coaching skills relevant to the challenges your sellers are facing, they’ll feel motivated instead of daunted by quotas. The direct ROI of your investment is more wins. When you win, morale is high and that success feeds off of itself.
Create the Momentum Your Team Needs to Drive Results
As you try to build momentum to carry you through this economic season and into growth, the last thing you need is a gap in your sales force that upsets your rhythm. In a time when budgets are tight, focusing inward and elevating your existing talent is key to driving your desired outcomes. We explore more strategies to maximize your sales team’s efficiency in this playbook for leaders navigating economic change.
