Happy sales reps are more productive and can sell up to 37% more (and more productivity plus increased revenue is definitely something to strive for!)
As if greater productivity and sales weren’t enough, keeping reps happy helps you retain them, reducing recruiting and onboarding costs and driving more revenue to the bottom line.
Although most reps like money, it takes more than a great paycheck to make salespeople happy. But what other things can you do besides pay your reps well to lift their productivity and their total sales? Here are a few ways to improve sales rep contentment on the job while reaping the rewards.
Sales reps historically only spend 33% of their time on selling activities. The rest of their time is filled with admin tasks and meetings. Believe me, this is frustrating to sales reps - they’d rather be engaged in sales activities and customer calls.
The best way to solve this problem is by arming your sales team with tools to streamline processes, boost productivity, and free up more selling time.
Highly engaged team members are known to:
One facet of employee engagement is having good relationships with coworkers. Offer sales reps a variety of internal communication channels and activities where team members can get to know each other to serve this purpose.
Communication channels such as messaging, and video platforms are effective. And events such as happy hour, team building activities and small group activities are beneficial whether they’re in person or virtual.
Lack of career growth opportunities is the "No. 1 reason people change jobs today." And one of the best ways to retain top talent is by integrating development opportunities into your culture.
Creating a coaching culture is an effective way to offer reps a means to build their skills while boosting sales. This type of organization strongly supports coaching and skills development by offering continuous individualized training and coaching. So, each rep receives group training, one-on-one coaching, and the opportunity to do self-coaching as well. This ensures continuous skill building and performance improvement.
The rep can build their skills while increasing their income and improving job satisfaction. Plus, this makes them less likely to leave your company, potentially for a competitor.
Another way to engage sales reps while developing their skills is by encouraging them to collaborate with other team members through peer-to-peer coaching. Sharing call snippets with other team members enables reps to ask for feedback when learning new skills. It also allows them to ask their counterparts to share best practice snippets of their own where they handled the same situation successfully.
This takes the pressure off sales management to do all the sales coaching while encouraging collaborative teamwork. The results go beyond continuous skill development, to engage sales reps while building relationships with their colleagues.
Compensation plans are intended to motivate specific behaviors and direct sales reps to focus on desirable deal types. But the plan isn’t effective if it’s so confusing that tracking progress toward targets or identifying the most profitable deals to focus on is difficult. And this becomes a source of frustration and demotivation to sales reps.
This doesn’t have to be the case if you leverage the transparency of a compensation solution like QuotaPath, making it easy for reps to track their progress toward personal and business goals. Plus, sales reps can easily see pre-calculated commissions on open deals in the pipeline and their potential impact on hitting goals. This serves to motivate reps while driving better performances like a 15% increase in quota attainment.
Employees who receive the most recognition are the happiest. So take the time to recognize sales reps for accomplishments both big and small! Things to celebrate may include mastering a new skill, ramp time during onboarding, closing a deal, hitting or exceeding quota, self-coaching activities and investing time supporting peers. You can go beyond public acknowledgment by also giving out small gifts of recognition like coffee shop gift cards or company swag.
Happy sales reps are more productive and close more business. Increasing their contentment on the job takes more than a hefty paycheck. By implementing some of the ideas listed above, you can reap the rewards of a happy sales team and boost your bottom line at the same time.
Interested in increasing your sales reps’ happiness? Book a demo with a member of our team to see how Jiminny can help improve their skills to win more business.
Interested to see how QuotaPath can make it easier for reps to track commissions while increasing quota attainment? Click here to book a free 30-minute consultation to create a compensation plan strategy.