I get asked this all the time from sales leaders I work with: How do I motivate my team? They tell me the team seems demoralised and some of them might be looking for new jobs. What can I do?
In this episode, we find out what drives sales professionals which will help leaders understand how to motivate their sales team.
You need to discover your “Why?”.
Why are you doing this? What truly motivates you? I heard years ago that the word “Motivation” really stands for your motive for action. So what’s your motive for action? What gets you out of bed every morning? Why do you work late at night? Why do you keep sending that one extra email or making that one extra phone call when you’d rather go home and just go to sleep? What drives you? What truly motivates you?
A lot of us are motivated by, you guessed it, money. We all love money and money’s great. Money buys cars, money buys houses, it buys a lot of things – clothes, designer bags, shoes, vacations, travel. You name it. We all love money but here’s something that I’ve learned over the years and maybe you’ve learned this too: Money is not an end. Money is simply a means to that end. Think about what truly motivates you. What are you really working towards?
It may not even be what motivates you. Maybe it’s who motivates you or who are you doing this for. Do you have kids? Are you married? Well I do. I’ve got two kids, beautiful wife and two lovely young boys. They drive me. They motivate me every single day to work harder and to do more, and quite frankly, to be more. That’s who motivates me. My wife, she continually drives me to succeeding and going above and beyond and doing more than I even thought I could do. So, who motivates you in your life?
Maybe it’s your parents. If you still have living parents they’ve looked after you their whole lives. Well at least your whole life they looked after you. I know that my parents worked so hard, sacrificed a lot, to make sure that I had everything that I needed to succeed in life. Now it’s your turn. It’s your turn to take care of your parents. Support them. And look I know it’s not easy, if you’ve got parents and you have kids maybe you feel kind of squeezed. Sometimes we call it the Sandwich Generation, where you’re supporting both your parents and your kids.
But no one said life was easy. It’s your turn now and it’s your responsibility. So whenever you feel like things are getting hard and it’s too tough and you don’t want to keep going and you just want to give up. I invite you, in fact, I challenge you to think about your kids, your husband or wife and your parents.
They’re counting on you.