How do you motivate your reps when the going gets tough?
Making 60-100 dials per day is draining. Saying (essentially) the same things over and over and over is boring. Researching leads isn’t anyones dream job. Even the best people occasionally border on burnout.
So how do you motivate reps (especially if they cold call) to get after it with energy and enthusiasm?
SDR teams and AE teams alike struggle with this, and are likely going to experience this more and more as teams grow and the landscape (to sell AND recruit) becomes more competitive.
The SDR function is becoming more popular and organizations are growing the number of SDRs they have in relation to AEs. At the same time, companies are hiring reps with less and less experience—at PatientPop, we’re often hiring people right out of college to be SDRs.
Most of the leaders I talk to site keeping SDRs motivated as a top challenge. Leaders surveyed by the Bridge Group in their recent research said this was a challenge, as well.
On top of that, AE tenure is extremely low–it’s common to see reps leave for new companies every year or so, even when they’re crushing it.
I did a Google search on the topic, read a bunch of articles, and broke 80% or more of what I found into the traditional motivation tactics, what I call “the three Cs”:
The Three C’s
- Contests
- Comp plans
- Competition
I’ve been experimenting with this over the last two and a half years. As far as I can tell, they are NOT the most important motivators for reps, and sometimes don’t work at all.
To be clear, I’m not knocking them—you can often get a short-term boost from the right contest; you can kill your org with a bad comp plan; if you have a lot of competitive people, you can get more out of them by having them face off.
But these are low-ROI tactics that require too much time and effort to pull off. They don’t scale.
But the REAL problem is that they don’t give your reps a long-term reason to get excited about work every day. So how do you do that?
The best motivators fall into one of two categories: help the rep feel great about what they’re doing or give them the feeling of having a large impact.
Motivators That Work
1. Positive Feedback
This is something that works for every rep, every time. Shit, it works for every person. Don’t you want someone to notice when you’ve done a good job?
It’s virtually costless to you. It keeps new reps going when they feel like they’re failing, and it makes experienced reps want to give more. Just go tell someone that they’re doing a great job—and be specific! And don’t just save this for your top rep. Tell that rep who’s working hard but hasn’t clicked, yet, that you appreciate them working hard today. Trust me, you do—that hard work will pay off.
2. Continuous Training
Optimism is strongly correlated with success in sales AND in learning new skills. You want your rep to be successful by learning a new skill! If you believe things will get better and that you have some control over whether or not they do, you’re much more likely to be optimistic. You can make your reps more optimistic by helping them get better! If you really want to nail this, carve out 30 minutes every day to have training with your crew. Remember, this is on top of coaching (that should happen at least weekly, if not daily).
3. Give Them Projects
At some point, your reps are going to ask you if they can help make something better. I’m not exaggerating, this is the dream. Two of our reps pulled me aside after a meeting this week to ask if they could help improve our cadence emails. Yes! This not only signals that you’re building the right culture, but it creates space for your reps to have an impact they can see spread across the organization. There are few things more motivating than that. And the bonus: the managers don’t have to do it!
4. Encourage Them to Lead
There will come a day when you need to be out of the office for a long time. If you haven’t, yet, you should take a long vacation (you likely need it). Nearly all of our leaders went on our Presidents Club trip this year (only the managers who joined us after the new year didn’t go). Those two business days of almost no managers were break out days because our tenured people stepped up and became leaders (also our sole SDR manager that stayed behind is a boss).
5. Micro Promotions
You want to reward your top people in bursts of less than a year if they’re really killing it. And it’s not just about financial rewards–that bump can be small, or in some cases non-existent. This step does three things:
- Lets your reps know that they’ve done a good job and have therefore earned something.
- Causes them to feel forward movement. We all want to feel like we’re making forward progress!
- Can (and I recommend this) earn them some extra responsibility. Perhaps they interview candidates, run trainings, or mentor a new rep.
We have a Senior SDR designation and one of my reps earned it. But by the time it was approved, we were already offering him the chance to go to AE. I didn’t think he’d care about the Senior promotion, but he was pumped! Now, he said, he gets to show two promotions in just six months. That looks great on LinkedIn, doesn’t it?
If you do these things, you’ll likely develop a highly engaged sales org that consistently gets better. You’ll be able to give your team the things they value highly and that will impact their careers without burning tons of cash or spending a ton of time trying to think of new creative things.
What other motivators are you using at your org?
If you liked this, check out my stuff on recruiting (here). And for a low-cost training module, have your reps read these books.
Ready to accelerate your leadership skills?
