Salespeople with a positive and creative outlook are more productive and efficient, which means thatsales managers and supervisors should focus on what really motivates and excites individuals. People will generally improve their performance if empowered to develop their own strategic capability and responsibility within the organisation.
Entrepreneur spoke to one of South Africa’s most successful sales and marketing directors, Multichoice’s Graham Pfuhl, to find out how he keeps his team of 12 sales and promotions people perky.
What do you do to maintain your sales team’s motivation levels?
Multichoice’s sales and promotions teamworks on financial incentives based on achieving targets, but we also do a fair amount of non-formal incentivising such as weekends away and afternoons off. If people like to work from home, we try to give them as much latitude as possible.
Certain targets, such as the growth of the subscriber base, form part of each team member’s targets, but others, such as the effectiveness of our advertising and the likeability of the brand are set for specific people in the team.
We hold an annual national teambuilding exercise, and regional sessions a few times a year. These are a combination of work and fun. Last year, for example, we took our sales and marketing team to Cape Town.
We also hold regular management indabas for senior management, where we report on what is happening in the business.
Once a year there is an organisation-wide “state of the station” where the whole company gets together. This is a fun event that usually sees the senior executives dressing up and giving the employees a bit of a show. At senior level too, the incentives are both financial and non-financial, including ad hoc, informal gestures. Each manager in the team takes charge of incentives and has the right to reward employees as they see fit. We often barter with companies for air time, so if we do a deal with a game lodge, for example, that means they give us a number of room nights that we can award to subscribers and staff.
Have any motivational schemes bombed?
What you do find is that you must avoid spoiling your staff. Incentives must be appreciated and not taken for granted. The rewards you put in place cannot be so easy to obtain that people just expect them. It’s also important to be democratic and ask for suggestions to ensure that you take people’s own preferences into account. This makes the reward meaningful to them.