Fiona Challis: motivation.

What can sales leaders learn about motivation from the world of sports, asks Fiona Challis.

In the world of sports, teams have a coach to provide motivation, inspiration, enhance their skills and help them achieve peak performance. Similarly, in the world of business, sales teams look to their leader or manager to provide motivation, inspiration, enhance their skills and help them to achieve peak performance.

Similarities

Successful sports teams and successful sales team actually have a lot of similarities. They both need focus, they have shared goals and vision, and individuals within the team have their own personal goals which they take positive action towards achieving everyday.

These individuals take responsibility for their own success; however, they have the ability to work together as a team. They have a leader who provides inspiration and coaches them to recognise their strengths and identify the motivational drivers which they can utilise on a daily basis to sustain their motivation. It is all of these elements which enable both sports teams and sales teams to achieve peak performance.

Rowers: individual performance, team success.

If I were to ask a sports coach and a sales leader what the attributes are which enable their team to achieve peak performance, in most cases they would both provide the same answer:

• a winning attitude;
• belief in themselves;
• being motivated;
• being determined and focused;
• having confidence; and
• taking positive action everyday to achieve their goal.

Daily motivation

However, if I were to ask them how often they provide motivation and inspiration to their team in order to help them achieve peak performance, it is highly likely that the sports coach will say ‘daily’. However, in many cases, the sales manager/leader will say ‘as and when it is needed’ or ‘when we are not achieving the results we need’.

And this is the key differentiator between a sales leaders and a coach. 

Let’s look at some of today’s well known sporting icons like Andy Murray or Tiger Woods. Do you think they train to enhance their skills on a daily basis? Do they have a regime to enhance their motivation, self-confidence and focus for an upcoming game? Do they work with their coach on a daily basis to gain inspiration and visualise success? Now, I do not claim to be a sports coach; however, my understanding is that they do.

I once heard a quote which goes: ‘motivation is like bathing; it is needed on a daily basis.’

Workout

If sales people are to be successful, they also need a daily workout to sustain motivation, increase confidence and their focus to achieve excellence; and it is their leaders they look to get the inspiration and guidance on how to achieve this.

Sales leaders do not intentionally try to de-motivate their teams, as their objective is to get their teams to achieve results. Unfortunately, however, by not providing inspiration and motivation on a daily basis they are letting the motivation of their teams ebb away. 

De-motivation

Here are the top ten ways that managers can unintentionally de-motivate their sales teams:

1. Don’t engage your team in setting the vision and goals for your team. Their job is to hit target and yours is create the strategy and roll out the targets.
2. Clearly outline what you expect of your team members on a quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily basis.
3. Remind your team on a regular basis of the areas they need to improve in.
4. Micro-manage you people, as this is the best way to ensure that they remain focused, are productive and take action.
5. Only give recognition to those who achieve 100% at the end of the quarter. When providing performance feedback to those who did not achieve target, don't let them find their own solution when you can reinforce your position of authority by telling them what they ‘obviously should have done’.
6. Parade your top performers in front of your average performers and tell them that they should aspire to be like them.
7. To increase motivation, dangle cash incentives and rewards to drive performance.
8. If team members are not performing, use your positional power to intimidate people in order to get them to work harder.
9. If you don’t believe a team member can succeed then tell them; it might make them try and prove you wrong and you may get more from them.
10. To gain sales results, focus on creating a plan for them to hit their target; however, you don’t need to know about their own personal goals

The sports approach

GB Olympic cyclists: coaching triumph.

1. Get to know each individual in the team, helping them to establish their own personal vision and goals. Remember you cannot set goals for other people; to truly own a goal individuals must set their own goals.
2. Increase individuals’ focus by reminding them on a daily basis of the personal benefits they will gain by achieving their goals and objectives.
3. Break goals down into small achievable chunks and empower your team members to create their own action plan. By empowering your team members to come up with their own creative solutions, you increase their commitment to taking action and you encourage them to take responsibility for their own success.
4. Build confidence and self-esteem by identifying your team’s strengths and recognising what they have already achieved. 
5. Help your team to visualise that they are already successful and anchor those feelings of success so that they can draw on them on a daily basis.
6. Align personal and team goals. Whether the personal goal is to earn more money, beat personal records and being recognised as a great athlete or getting into the trials of the Olympic Games, you need to help team members identify their goal. By identifying the personal goals you team members focus and direction. When you identify what they really want, you then work backwards to where they are today and identify the milestones they need to achieve to get where they want to be. One of the milestones will be to achieve target or corporate goals, so you create a win-win for both you and your team members. They key thing to remember here is that, if you want to lead people to achieve, you need to lead them in a direction that is motivational for them.
7. When communicating with your team, ensure you are consistent and the methods of communication are understood and motivating for all individuals within the team.
8. Understand that the root of motivation is different for all individuals within your team and that true motivation comes from within – it can’t be imposed. To sustain motivation, help team members tap into their own motivational drivers, encourage them to talk frequently about previous times in their career/life when they were highly motivated and only use rewards and incentives directed towards your team motivational drivers to provide motivational top ups.
9. Ensure that team members believe that they can be successful and that they believe in themselves. Limiting beliefs can hold back even the most confident people from achieving success. Limiting beliefs are like having weeds growing in your garden; if you do not pull them out, they will take over your garden. When they take over individuals they will, lower confidence and self-esteem, which will limit their potential, so identify and remove limiting beliefs and replace with empowering beliefs that will maximise individuals’ potential.
10. Provide effective and evidence based feedback on a regular basis to increase individual’s self-confidence and motivation to taking the next steps to achieving success.

Ask yourself this question

The question that I would advise all sales leaders to ask themselves is: ‘If I were given the opportunity to manage my favourite sporting icon, would I manage them any differently to the way I currently manage my team?’ If your answer is yes, then ask yourself how could you incorporate that style of management into your current team to truly motivate your team members and help them to achieve peak performance.

Please click to find out more about how to truly motivate a sales team, and how motivational power can increase your team’s performance. You can contact Fiona Challis on 01189 767658.

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