Sales Team Retention: Salary is No Longer the Primary Motivator

Sales professionals are highly sought after: according to a study by Hays consulting firm, they represent 20% of all recruitments. But to attract and retain your sales team, salary alone is no longer enough. Whether it’s an inside or field salesperson, their expectations have evolved. Beyond money, there is always a more personal motivation: they seek autonomy, purpose, recognition, and challenges to stay and excel within a company.

Give Purpose to Daily Work Life

For salespeople, as in most 21st-century professions, people now want to go to work feeling that what they accomplish has meaning. In this regard, it is important to inform your team about the medium-to-long-term strategy and objectives they are working towards.

Also foster cohesion and connection among your sales team, especially if you have field sales representatives, who are often geographically separated. Indeed, this group can easily feel isolated. Constant communication with their peers, as well as with their hierarchy, will foster good understanding and a sense of belonging that will positively affect the quality of their work environment. To achieve this, provide them with the means to communicate with each other, for example, through messaging tools or internal social networks to discuss their profession and their daily field experiences. These tools can also be used to share best practices or advice among colleagues, thereby fostering a sense of being valuable to the entire company.

Provide Them with Opportunities for Professional Growth

Are you familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? This diagram transcribes the observations of psychologist Abraham Maslow in the 1940s, regarding motivation. At the base of this pyramid is the need for survival, followed by security, and at the very top, we find the need for self-actualization. If we consider that satisfying the need for survival and security corresponds to a salary, benefits, and a stable contract, there still remains personal fulfillment to satisfy for an employee to be happy and motivated at work. This can be achieved through professional growth and the pride that comes with it.

The mobility rate observed among sales executives is 28%, which is the highest percentage compared to other functions. To retain your sales team, you must offer them career development opportunities within your organization, so they don’t look for them elsewhere. To grow, a salesperson must master their sector and all related challenges, but also expand their knowledge. New tools provide access to micro-training on smartphones or tablets, with short videos or quizzes to strengthen their skills. This will help them fulfill their ambitions.

Encourage Autonomy Among Your Sales Team

In a study on employee motivation, American journalist and author Dan Pink stated that the need to be valued and recognized comes from a manager’s trust in their teams. To achieve this, grant autonomy to your sales team. This is a source of self-motivation.

Allow them to track results and progress indicators in real-time, accessible at any time. Some platforms offer this tracking in the form of simple but effective diagrams, as opposed to the perpetual – and boring – Excel spreadsheet. By giving your sales team all the tools to track their own objectives, you optimize their chances of taking responsibility and performing well.

Implement Motivating Challenges for Everyone

The most common method to motivate salespeople remains the challenge. But in 2017, for it to work, the challenge must be innovative and mobile: opt for a fun and intuitive platform to track rankings in real-time from all devices. For all salespeople to get involved, it must concern everyone and not just your top performers, thanks to sub-challenges in which everyone will have a chance to win.

Where there’s a challenge, there’s a reward! Science has shown that strong experiences motivate more than objects or money, while also leaving a lasting memory. To make them want to excel, salespeople need something extraordinary. Impersonal and uninspiring monetary and material gifts are not always enough to motivate your entire team. Then Focus on Originality with a dream reward: an exceptional flight in a Mirage 2000, a trip, dinner at a Michelin-starred restaurant, a parachute jump, a stay at Disneyland, … Of course, adapting this choice to your target audience and your budget. You can also offer collective rewards: group rewards contribute to building team culture and a shared history. Some experiences may even become unforgettable memories for your team.

And you, what are the most effective motivators for your sales team?

Discover how to sustainably boost your sales team’s motivation