Sales Team Motivation: It’s All About the Carrots [Video]

After years of managing sales teams, LevelEleven CEO Bob Marsh discovered that it’s all about the carrots — at least when it comes to sales team motivation. Check out this short video to find out what exactly he learned and how it led to the creation of LevelEleven.

http://youtu.be/erntMooHfyg

Or, you can read the transcript:

Bob: I’ve been managing salespeople for years, and man, it’s hard to keep them focused on the right things to help them win more business. I mean, they want to sell more so they can make more, but in the day-to-day execution the small misses can be the difference between making and missing our number.

Sales Rep 1: [On phone] Yeah — sure, John. A meeting in February 2017 sounds awesome. Thanks for the interest! 

Sales Rep 2: [On phone] No, we don’t need to meet in person. Let’s just do a screen share. 

Bob: I’ve tried managing with the proverbial stick, but it just doesn’t feel right, and it just doesn’t work. So I made a huge investment in a CRM system, salesforce.com, thinking that if I could just measure what’s happening in the sales organization, ultimately I can motivate it. [Approaches Sales Reps 3 and 4] Hey guys, got a sec? 

Sales Rep 3: What’s up?

Bob: So I just did this research that said when you get your sales opportunities to Stage 3, your odds of winning go way up. Isn’t that awesome?

Sales Rep 3: Wow. That’s fascinating. 

Bob: So, if you could start keeping track of that and put it into Salesforce it would be a huge help. 

Sales Rep 3 and 4: Yeah. [Look at each other and shake their heads “no.”]

Bob: [Sales reps arm wrestle in background.] And then it hit me: Salespeople are competitive. There must be a way to tap into that competitive nature and get them focused on the right behaviors with incentives around something that interests them. So that’s why I launched LevelEleven, a simple way to create competition around any behavior I want the team focused on. If I can measure it in our CRM system, I can create competition around it with LevelEleven. [Bob approaches Sales Rep 5.] Hey, so Karley — remember when we rolled out that new sales process?

Sales Rep 5: Yeah, that was amazing. 

Bob: Yeah, well, I know no one’s really following it. So here’s what we’re going to do: We’re going to run a little contest, and every time you advance a sales opportunity to Stage 3, you’re going to get a carrot. [All sales reps look at carrot.] And we’re going to have a leaderboard that keeps track of how many carrots people are getting. [Bob moves away from rep to speak directly to camera.] And the results have been incredible. At any time I can go through our six-step process to pinpoint the exact behaviors I want my team to focus on this week, this month or this quarter and then socialize performance against those with real-time leaderboards in Salesforce, on my iPhone and even on the big screen. So the next time you need to rally your team around something important, take it from me — use carrots.