How To Use “The Company Circus” To Motivate Your Sales Team
It may not always be the right thing to do, but poking fun at the “corporate circus” that inevitably envelops most companies does wonders to keep your salespeople motivated.
It earns you credibility and allows them to see you as real – not as just some corporate stooge.
All companies have it - the sales contests that demotivate instead of motivate, the disjointed initiatives that sends the department into a frenzy, the company initiatives that actually impair your sales people’s ability to increase sales while decreasing selling time…you know the ones I’m talking about!
Use these situations to your advantage.
When you rise above them and poke fun at them, it keeps you real and transparent – it makes you into someone your salespeople can identify with.
In fact, the more bureaucracy that exists in your organization, the more opportunity there is to gently poke fun at the company while keeping your mission, as well as the mission of the organization, foremost.
The key is knowing when to do it, because once you rake the organization over the coals, you must immediately get them back on track and explain the “why” behind it…from the corporate perspective.
Keep it real. Get them back on board with the mission, but sift through the corporate “box-checking”.
If you get an overwhelming amount of resistance to any particular policy, make sure you frame it in reality. Whether you’re selling boxes or biologicals, the company you work for has dozens of standard operating procedures that make little, if any sense. If you can’t change the policy (worth a try), then you can always poke fun at it.
Be careful though…you don’t want your attitude to sour them even further. Just as quickly as you “poke fun”; you need to as quickly, get your sales reps all back on track.
What if your salespeople still don’t get it? Then you may need to give them a little dose of reality: the only place where they can make all the decisions and assure themselves that they are all sensible, is if they run the show.
If they run the business, they can then make the rules.
Running your own business has a long list of detractors as well – maybe even more than their current roles. Dealing with bureaucracy and idiotic corporate initiatives is part of the contract you sign on for when you work for someone else – so get them full on board so you both can deal with it as best as you can.
Post a response to this blog and tell me how you keep your salespeople on track when company initiatives make no sense…
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