How to engage your salespeople beyond monetary compensation?

Today, financial incentives alone are not enough to motivate sales teams due to recruitment challenges and high turnover. To ensure your sales teams perform at their best and remain committed long-term, it's essential to provide meaning in their work, opportunities to take initiative, and the chance to be part of a collective endeavor. These factors are now crucial for sales professionals.

Motivation is not activated by pressing a button!

The question of sales representatives' commitment calls for a prerequisite tinged with humility:

"You can't motivate someone; you can only create the right conditions for a person to activate their own drive."

This may seem obvious, but it qualifies certain prevailing discourses offering "turnkey" solutions for generating engagement within sales teams (from mobile apps to team-building activities, to incentives of all kinds).

Let's be clear, while these solutions can have a real training effect and stimulate the involvement of a sales team in the short term, the notion of engagement appeals to the deep motivations of individuals, and these motivations have evolved in recent years.

The concept of "meaning" and values are increasingly important, especially among younger generations.

We are seeing a general shift in the priorities of employees, including in the sales sector: less focused on money as an end in itself or on attributes of power, employees today place increasing importance on the meaning of their work and the values conveyed by the company in which they do it, or plan to enter.

This is particularly true of the younger generation entering the job market today, as highlighted in the latest Universum¹ study, which reveals a growing attachment among students to criteria related to CSR, ethics, and equality in their career choices:

"1 in 3 students think ethics is an important subject (especially in Business), and 26% consider the ethical principles of companies important."

 

This is also evidenced by the success of the Student Manifesto for an Ecological Awakening, launched by students from leading schools, including HEC, in which they say they are ready to boycott companies that do not commit to ecology, even if it means earning less.

Money no longer buys happiness... or at least, engagement!

While it's important to acknowledge the nuanced significance of values and ethics in career choices (as the same study indicates that, beyond what people say, business school students still predominantly choose their first jobs based on companies offering high earning potential and strong CV credentials), it's crucial to remember that financial considerations are no longer the sole determining factor, and salespeople are now driven by a variety of motivations.

Beyond ethics, several criteria have become essential in salespeople's career choices, including: having an immediate impact on the company, experiencing collective "professional challenges", and being autonomous in their work.

So, how do you integrate this evolution of sales representatives' aspirations into your management style?

New levers for sales team engagement

Here are several areas you can work on to encourage engagement from your sales teams and develop your company's attractiveness:

•      Focus on the company's values and purpose: Feeling useful is crucial for engagement! And to contribute to this, there's nothing like defining your company's mission, giving meaning to its actions, and highlighting its positive impact on society. This is what Simon Sinek calls the 'Golden Circle', which corresponds to the 'WHY?' in his clear diagram describing what makes a company much more attractive and commercially successful than another.

•   Promote autonomy and initiative: Encouraging initiative means allowing your sales representatives to participate in decisions that concern them and to be involved in the organization of their daily work (for example, by asking them to define the means to be implemented to achieve their objectives). This also involves letting them experiment (a new pitch, a new sequence of emails, the operation of a new CRM tool, etc.) within a defined framework (objectives, time, etc.) by trusting them and giving them the right to make mistakes.

•   Develop "Coopetition" and the sharing of best practices: In a constantly evolving environment, the playing field is constantly changing, and what is best at one moment is not necessarily best the next! Therefore, promoting the sharing of best practices internally is a good way to value the best performers while ensuring that everything does not rest on their shoulders. To do this, you can encourage the establishment of times during which a member of the sales team will train their colleagues on a tool, a technique, or an approach that they apply with better results than others. Thus, the group will benefit from both the benefits of emulation and those of collaboration, and everyone will have the opportunity to highlight their strengths.

A change of posture for managers

While these levers are based on values and give pride of place to collaborative approaches, activating them is not necessarily idealistic and is not 'free' for companies: not only is it a factor of team engagement and stability, but implementing these levers is conducive to agility and innovation, and therefore ultimately to the sustainability and performance of your company.

However, it implies a real change in posture, which can be counter-intuitive for many managers: the "inherited" management styles of recent decades were largely based on a "command and control" logic.

Today, it's about placing greater value on 'doing better' than on 'doing good,' even if it takes more time initially.

By shifting the role of employees from executing systems designed upstream and often applied in a « top-down » manner to reflection and initiative-taking, a significant evolution in the role of managers is induced. Their mission now consists of building a secure and stimulating framework, creating trust, and fostering skills development.

Much more in a 'coach' position and in a support logic, they question and listen to their teams without necessarily wanting to know everything, to help them find the best solutions themselves.

From now on, the competence of sales managers is no longer evaluated by the quality of their answers, but by that of their questions!

A less obvious approach to activate than just the financial lever, certainly, but one that also gives meaning and value to the mission of sales managers themselves!

Are you facing a crisis situation? Have you considered repositioning your commercial action? To find out how, watch this webinar: