“If you’re trying to drive someone to where they don’t want to go, it won’t work. They need to understand their why.” AJ shares with you 4 tips on how to get your team motivated again.
Today we’re going to talk about how to get people unstuck without being pushy. This topic was inspired by Kristine, one of our Emerge Rock Star students – she asked about how to get into a routine when you feel stuck and how to reinvigorate builders. This has also come up in my coaching calls with leaders.
Many times you’ll hear “You don’t motivate people, people have to be motivated themselves,” or “The drive has to come from within.” There is some truth to that, but as a coach one of my greatest strengths is helping people move to action. I will give you a few quick tips on how to do that, while cultivating a healthy, fun environment. Stay with me because tip 4 is the best!
Let’s dive right into the tips to reinvigorate any type of motivation
Number 1: Understand the spark – fan the fire.
Leadership and sales have a lot in common. So when you are selling something, you have to find the need, the spark that is uncovering the need for your product. For someone to be inspired to action in sales is similar, we need to uncover the spark, the need, the why. Have your team tell you why they want to do something. If you’re trying to drive someone where they don’t want to go, it won’t work. They need to understand their why.
You can create sparks with good questions, though. Like in conversation: What’s important to you about bringing this into people’s lives? What did you want to do for your family again? What was it that sparked your drive to do xyz?
Their answer will get themselves reignited.
Number 2: Fan the spark by doing things together!
Things are more fun in groups, or with at least with buddy. Entrepreneurship can be lonely. Studies have shown that people can be moved to more powerful action in groups (sometimes that is bad, but in this case we’re using our powers for good). A formal coaching relationship works really well. I’ve experienced that as both being coached and by coaching others.
Basically, setting goals is more real if you share them and you have someone encouraging you towards those goals.
Number 3: Set up milestones.
This is how you get into a routine when you set goals – there need to be some specifics. Rank goals might be a little hard for some to fathom. Activity goals are controllable. Edwin Locke is a big name in the research of goal setting and in one of his studies he says:
Goal setting is most likely to improve task performance when the goals are specific and sufficiently challenging, the subjects have sufficient ability…feedback is provided to show progress in relation to the goal, rewards such as money are given for goal attainment, the experimenter or manager is supportive, and assigned goals are accepted by the individual.
^An interpretation: be a supportive leader and that means agreement from your team member is needed 🙂
Medlin and Green found that goal setting positively impacts employee engagement, employee engagement positively impacts optimism, and optimism positively impacts individual performance.
^ That is how we get the spark to grow into a fire. How do we do this and make it fun!
Number 4: Make it a game.
In my first week as a sales manager I was assigned to a team that was very unmotivated. “Do you all like making 100 calls per day?” I would ask. They said, “No.” “Do you all like talking to people?” “Yes.” I asked them “Do you all like games?” “Yes.” I then asked, “Would you help me make a fun game that we could play as a team and win a free lunch on me?”
The moral is that most people like games, they’re fun, and if you’re competing against yourself and, for the right reasons, games are a great way to engage a team.
What are the rules and how do we win? The team I led just stated that rank goals are too far away, and a disclaimer, if you are a leader and you tell everyone “Hey we’re are going to have a game to see who can get the most enrollments,” that might land flat for some people and demotivate them. Besides that, no one needs games to be motivated to enroll – enrolling people is already fun. The game needs to be based on the activities that aren’t already fun while still getting enrollments.
So laying out the game and how to win could look like this:
Let’s say everyone wants to enroll 4 people in the month. Remember to think realistically. How do we get there?
I am going to gauge this by the closing rates of our students which is about 75%, so then we just do some backwards math.
We need to have appointments with about 6 people, so we need to invite about 8. And it all begins with the outreach, so let’s start the game there.
The first week is outreaching to 20 people.
So to win the game this week is to call or message 20 people to engage in an appointment or class.
You could have bonus points or rules. You must connect with at least 15 of the 20 people, for example. So if you get no response from 10, then you need to keep outreaching until you engage with the 15. Are those rules fair?
They will say yes, of course, because it’s all in their best interest.
And you can get creative with the engagement and prizes (They don’t even have to have a cost associated to you). I promised a team member that if she won I would sing the “I’m a little teapot” song at our team meeting; the more engaged you are the more engaged everyone will be.
And, hey, the odds are in their favor for winning because it’s something they can control. Everyone wins too, especially the customers being served!
I hope you found this post helpful to inspire motivation for your team. Thanks for reading. Please leave a comment below or message me at aj@emergesalestraining.com and let me know how these tips worked out for you and your team.