By Employee turnover not high enough? Looking to demotivate your sales floor until their ready to throw in the towel?
Then look no further. We’ve compiled eight great ways to turn your sales floor into a dejected group, so that they’re ready to pack their things and get as far away from your business as possible.
If you’re looking to get your top sales reps to quit, ensure you follow these eight rules...
Build in too many non-sales activities
Sure, a sales role doesn’t mean you should spend all day every day on the phone. But research by InsideSales found out nearly two-thirds (64.8%) of a sales reps’ time, on average, is spent on activities that are not focused on selling or generating revenue.
As well as that, only 22.9% of reps follow any kind of time management methodology, and only 17.9% of time is spent within a CRM - a crucial tool for the sales process.
Simply put, sales reps are bogged down by too much unnecessary admin. And we all know a mountain of paperwork, whether analog or digital, can be remarkably frustrating.
Don’t engage with the team
There’s never a more sure-fire way for a sales leader to alienate themselves from the rest of the team then to hide away in their office. Leadership - both positive and negative - will always transfer its energy to the sales floor.
Great sales leaders invest their time into developing relationships with their employees and leading by example. Seeing a sales leader get in the thick of it makes all the difference to morale and in the end, employee performance.
Don’t focus on results
In the end, the results are the bottom line. Great salespeople can thrive under circumstances where they are given measurable KPIs to hit.
If you instead decide to focus on things such as the amount of time they spend working a sale, or which software they plan their day with, it can lead to a demotivated salesperson and earn you a reputation as a micromanager.
Don’t deliver exciting products and services
A good rep appreciates a good product or service, and will deliver their pitches with know-how and passion. If a company refuses to innovate or deliver something exciting into the market, it can make a salesperson’s daily grind a bit stale. A product or service must always be offering something relevant to the core audience, something that drives need and therefore sales.
If the company is still working on changing their product or service, you can also work on giving your salespeople additional resources or content to use as part of their sales patter.
Don’t offer resources and best practices
A salesperson needs to feel like they’re consistently improving and growing professionally. And your leadership should also be one based on certain philosophies and ways of doing things. Therefore, you should look to skill up your employees with books, frameworks, and reference materials that will help them sell better and faster.
Not only that, but sales will also require resources and content to attract new customers. Lots of time can be wasted creating these resources, so focussing on sales enablement and sales and marketing alignment can ensure your team has everything they need to sell smartly.
Fail to invest in brand and marketing
A company’s brand is much more than a logo or the colour scheme on your website. It can give sales reps a clear narrative that allows them to deliver coherent messaging for your target audience. With an audience proposition built on detailed insights, your sales team will be able to explain the benefits to customers and prospects with absolute clarity.
The best sales reps want to work for businesses who are conscious of their brand positioning and manage their reputation well. For a start, your sales team needs to be clear on the company’s mission statement, long-term vision, and persuasive, on-brand marketing collateral.
Give your team no autonomy
We all want more productive employees - sales managers are no different. But many fine managers will have taken the risk of micromanaging employees, leading them to disengagment. This never ends well.
In The Elements of Great Managing, Rodd Wagner writes that absenteeism caused by disengagement costs a typical 10,000-person company $600,000 a year in salary for days where no work was performed, and that “disengagement-driven turnover costs most sizeable businesses millions every year.”
When the best sales reps have space and the freedom to go ‘off-script’, this can lead them to feeling less robotic and use their skills to great effect. When they know their manager has their back, and that they are trusted, they are much more likely to be fully engaged.
Burn your team out
If you’re lucky enough to have a hard-working team who are passionate about achieving results, then you need to also ensure that they don’t burn themselves out. Burnout is an epidemic within workplaces across with even the most engaged employees at risk.
Here are some tactics to ensure your sales reps aren’t at risk:
- Amplify and reward the wins to outweigh the many losses that a salesperson experiences every day
- Promote healthy living, such as healthy office snacks, yoga, or exercise challenges
- Put budget and resources aside for training or mentorship to upskill the team
Conclusion
Let’s hope you’re not following these eight ways to alienate and demotivate your sales reps. This blog should make it clear enough that more engaged and empowered sales reps = better selling, and stronger results.
With that in mind, a powerful CRM is one of the main tools salespeople should be using to empower sales reps to make smart, data-led decisions, and engage the modern B2B buyer.
Our guide to CRM can give you all the tips you need on how to integrate a CRM into your marketing and sales process, and win more business as a result. Download it today and see if a sales tech upgrade should be on the cards for your business.
