Employee motivation is always a hot topic with managers.

It doesn’t matter what department.

Those who work in sales are as likely to become demotivated as those on the floor.

Sales?

You mean sales people get demotivated?

Yup.

We’ll look at that in a bit more detail a little later.

 

In this article, we want to think about when games are appropriate for sales teams.

Considering the number that are available, you’d think that the answer was - all the time.

The logic seems to go like this.

The selling process is as boring as watching paint dry; therefore, sales people get bored.

When they’re bored, they don’t sell as much.

So, to get them excited again - to motivate them - we’ll create a game.

Those who win the game will sell more, and we’ll all live happily ever after.

Except that it doesn’t work like that.

You have to ask yourself if your fundamental assumption is correct.

 

What’s your assumption?

That the sales process is boring.

Is it?

That depends on who you ask.

You’ll find that the highest performing sales people don’t get bored easily.

As long as they’re free to make sales, they’re happy.

For them, selling is fun.

It’s a competition.

They’re competing against the targets their company has given them, other sales people, and themselves.

And you shouldn’t be surprised to know that those who are naturally competitive already have devised games for what they do.

It’s how they “keep score”.

They don’t need another game because they’re already playing one.

 

What is the essence of a game?

The first thing you need to understand is what the essence of a game is.

Game shows abound on radio and television.

Bingo and pub quizzes are commonplace.

We’ve even turned our passion for murder mysteries into a game.

It’s part of the British culture.

No one has to teach us how to play.

In most cases the prizes, if there are any, are modest.

On one programme, the mantra is that “points mean prizes”, but there never are any.

Many shows simply tell us that one person finished ahead of the other.

Then they chuckle a little about it.

 

In another show, we’re reminded that the clue is in the question.

And so it is here.

The clue is found in the word motivate.

It seems almost like an oxymoron to suggest that sales people need to be motivated.

Why?

Because true sales people - the ones who know that their calling in life is to sell, and who don’t feel complete unless they do - don’t have that problem; at least not for very long.

If they do, then there is a different underlying problem.

 

Why sales people aren’t motivated

There are a number of reasons why sales people aren’t motivated.

If you spend a little time thinking about it, then you can probably name most of them.

Here is just one reason, though it undoubtedly is the most important.

The most obvious reason why sales people aren’t motivated is that they’re in the wrong job.

Successful sales people make a very good living, and that may make it attractive as a profession; but as studies have consistently shown, money alone doesn’t motivate.

It doesn’t motivate people who sell, and it doesn’t motivate those who don’t.

We’ve known this for at least 50 years.

And it’s amazing that managers still believe that it does.

If you get nothing else from this article, then recognise this: Money doesn’t motivate employees who are not motivated already.

True sales people - those who love to sell, and who couldn’t live with themselves if they did anything else - are intrinsically motivated.

They just are.

It’s why they get up in the morning.

It’s why they hate to go to bed at night.

It’s why they’re disappointed when they don’t make the sale.

And those who are in sales roles who aren’t like this aren’t true sales people.

They’re just pretending to be.

Did you get that?

And so it could well be that you’re trying to motivate people to sell who, given the chance, would rather do something else.

It’s worth exploring this a little more.

 

Perry Marshall, in his book 80/20 Sales & Marketing points out that just 20% of your sales team will make 80% of your total sales.

This so important, that we need to hear it straight from him.

Pay attention.

“[I]f you hire 10 salespeople, two will generate 80 percent of the sales and the other eight will generate only 20 percent of the sales. That means that person for person, the two are SIXTEEN TIMES as effective as the eight” (emphases author’s, p. 5).

 

Read that over until you get it.

Now ask yourself this question: Does it make sense to spend a lot of time and money trying to make the sales process into a game so that the people who only generate 20% of your sales are motivated?

Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to improve your recruitment process so that those for whom selling is a mission, rather than just a job, are the ones who are on your team?

If two people out of ten make 80% of your sales, think what having ten people like those two would do for your sales.

 

Are people like this hard to find?

Yes.

But that doesn’t mean that you stop looking.

Your goal needs to be to get the best people for the job, not just those who are keen to do it.

There’s a difference.

There is something to be said for enthusiasm, though true sales people are enthusiastic already.

You don’t have to train them to be that way, and they don’t need to remind themselves that they are.

 

Earlier, we saw that even true sales people can become somewhat demotivated.

When that happens, you have to ask yourself why that is the case.

It could be nothing more than the fact that they’re struggling to live up to their own standards.

It could also be that the organisation is working against them; that through its policies and procedures it’s making it harder for sales people to do what they love to do.

And this is where you, as a manager, have some leverage.

If the goal is to sell more, then the organisation needs to do all that it can to support that effort.

Throwing more money at the problem won’t do much.

Perhaps that’s one reason why things like games are invented for sales people.

It’s because the organisation itself won’t change the way it works to support its salespeople; so instead it tries to impose some artificial motivator to get employees to play by their rules.

 

The truth of the matter is that the 20% who are making the majority of the sales for you don’t need you to create some kind of game for them.

What they do need is for you to unshackle them from the organisational restrictions that prevent them from performing at their best.

There may be a place for contests between sales teams, but certainly not within them.

If your team members don’t cooperate with each other, then you need to look at your reward structure.

It’s likely that, by design, you have them competing against one another.

 

Is it any wonder that they don’t collaborate?

You could use a kind of modified management-by-objectives.

It doesn’t need to be the full-blown, drawn-out, paper-pushing exercise that MBO is fundamentally.

Instead, you could ask your teams to devise rewards that they want for reaching or exceeding their targets.

When you do that, then you foster an environment which cause the team to function as a unit.

Now they’re working together for a common objective.

 

Keep it simple

There’s one more thing that needs to be said about this and that is that you need to keep it simple.

The goal is to increase sales.

You don’t want people spending their time trying to figure out how to play the game or how to game the system.

It should be easy enough to explain to an eight-year-old.

That’s not to say that your sales people are stupid; rather, it forces you to make it simple enough for them to spend their time on what matters: Selling.

Complicated games - those are anything that have unnecessary rules - waste time.

If you believe that “time is money”, then make sure that people spend their time making it; not reading about it.

And keep your metrics simple, too.

Work out exactly what you need to know and ignore the rest.

Einstein famously said that “not all things that can be counted count”.

Make sure you’re counting what counts.

 

Click here to improve sales results