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Finding out what best motivates your salespeople can easily be done using a CRM. When you tie together sales performance with hierarchy/compensation parameters, you can start to see different ways in which the way your organization is structured and how it rewards its staff is helping it to run smoothly - or fall short.

 

To use a baseball analogy, every player on a sales team has a different position. You have the manager, who delegates tasks and decides which position everyone else has. Then you have the regional managers, who have pretty much the same job as the manager but with more confined territory. And finally you have the sales representatives, who go out and talk to customers every day.

 

The customers an individual sales representative speaks to may vary - they may only talk to homeowner customers, or they may only talk to professionals, and so on. Sometimes, for whatever reason a sales rep has a hard time selling to a particular group of customers. If that is the case, it is the responsibility of the manager or a regional manager to identify the problem and address it. Another responsibility for managers and regional managers is to make sure that the staff below them are keeping the status quo - logging sales in the correct way, responding to customers with current information, etc.

 

Sales personnel can be motivated in many different ways. The most basic is a salary, which usually gets amended by commissions (percentages of the sales they make that are given to salespeople). Another common one is additional vacation days or sick days. Companies may buy tickets to sporting events or concerts and hand them out to salespeople whenever they land a big sale, or give a free trip to the top-earning salesperson at the end of the year.

 

Titles can be motivating factors in sales. Say you not only gave a salesperson a bonus check and a couple more vacation days, after they hit a certain amount of goods-sold, but you also changed their title from 'junior' to 'senior.' It shows that the company acknowledges that they have developed, and plus it serves a symbolic purpose in signifying that the person is progressing in their career.

 

Even the layout of a sales office can be a powerful motivation tool. Say every time you make your way up the ranks of a sales hierarchy, you get placed at a new desk, in a new cubicle, or in a new office. People like changes of scenery, and also getting to work near higher esteemed colleagues doesn't hurt. Having a well-planned layout for your sales office makes sense not just from a motivation point-of-view; salespeople who have similar amounts of experience can relate to each other better than salespeople with varying amounts. Also, it is easier for managers to announce policy changes when everyone they affect happens to be sitting in the same location.

 

Without a CRM, you would have to draw information from disparate sources and do legwork to get it all into the same format. A/B testing is made easier – examining two changes to your processes to see which has the bigger impact. Also, a CRM can produce data visualizations for you automatically, making it faster for you to produce an impactful presentation when it comes time to deliberate.