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You’ve probably discovered that having a well-motivated sales team is vital to you having a successful direct sales career. When you develop a strong sales team you have the potential for great financial benefits for yourself as well as your team members. So now that you are on your way to building a good sized sales team you need to know the secret to building a strong sales team. How do you keep them motivated so that they will have fun with what they are doing and be able to build a successful direct selling business for themselves?
Publish a team newsletter on a regular basis. I’ve found that the easiest thing that you can do to communicate with and keep up the motivation of your team is send out a team newsletter. This can be done through regular postal mail, by email or both whichever you think would work best for your group. You can include:
- Recognition for team members who have done a good job, achieved the highest sales, sponsored or reached a milestone.
- Words of encouragement and motivational quotes to get your team members excited about their business.
- Offer marketing and sales tips; things like theme party ideas, how to close a sale or follow up with customers and prospects.
- Invite your team to send in their own ideas that have worked for them.
- Collaborate a newsletter with your team leaders, many hands make light work and the more ideas shared the better.
You should send out your team newsletter at least once a month, or more often if you like.
How about sending a card? Another nice thing you can do to let your team members know that they are special to you is by sending a card to them on special occasions. Who doesn’t like to get a card in the mail? You can remember things like their wedding anniversaries, and birthdays but most importantly you can welcome new team members and recognize a consultant that has had an exceptional sales or sponsoring month. I make my own cards and have also purchased some very nice, but inexpensive cards so I always have them on hand. This will let your team members know that you appreciate them, and they won’t feel like they are simply a number that you recruited for your own personal gain.
Do you provide team training for your down line as motivation? I doesn’t matter whether your new recruits are direct sales pros or delving into their first experience, training is always a great thing. E-mail is a convenient way to offer team training, especially if you use an auto-responder service. This way you can load all your training materials and have them delivered automatically. You can also hold conference calls, and monthly or even weekly team meetings if everyone lives in your area. I created an entire training web site for my team which is a good option if your sales force is spread out across the country.
Offering incentives or awards for your team members can help them reach their sales and sponsoring goals. You can give them things like sales aides, catalogs, company training CDs, logo items, gift certificates or even products from your company if they meet goals like booking so many parties in a month, making so many sales phone calls, or meeting a certain amount of sales. Try to make the incentive fit the goal and the size of the accomplishment. It doesn’t need to be expensive but it’s nice if it’s something they can’t purchase themselves. I always pick up Watkins logo items when I attend our annual business conference, as these aren’t available any where else.
As I mentioned in a previous article, How To Prospect And Recruit Online With Ethics it’s important to develop a communication and support system for your team. The best thing that you can do is make yourself available to your team members and let them know how to get in touch with you and that they matter to you. Nothing is more motivating than knowing you have someone who is behind you and supports you all the way with your business. The best compliment I think I’ve ever received was when one of my team member’s told me she felt like I was her own personal cheer leader!
You don’t need to implement all these ideas at once, pick the one or two that fit your team’s needs at the moment. You can always add more as your team grows. Build relationships, have fun, and keep the communication going. With time you will have a super sales team that really loves what they do, which means success for everyone.
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