Jason M. Lemkin gives five ways to motivate salespeople: set realistic quotas that ramp gradually, design comp plans where top reps earn visibly large rewards, celebrate big wins publicly, hire a VP of Sales who recruits quota-hitters, and be transparent about results instead of pretending things are better than they are.
Hey everybody. Sales is hard. It's a lot of no's to get to a yes. It's at least more no's than yeses. So let me talk about five simple ideas to motivate your sales team and boost morale. The number one is make sure that you have sane quotas. This is a mistake. A lot of founders make fewer these days than the old days. But make sure that any rep that's good, anyone that's closing, 5, 10, whatever number of deals a month you need to make your business work, make sure they're hitting their on target earnings and they're making fair money and they're hitting their quota. If in the early days, the best a sales rep can do is 3 or $400,000 a month, but you want it to be 800, make it sane to start, at least in the beginning. And you may need to ramp those quotas up over time. Two is, especially when you have even a slightly bigger sales team. 5, 6, 8 or 10, make sure that you have a comp plan so that the number one rep, the number two rep, can make a lot of money. Make sure folks see them buying a nice new car, maybe buying a nice condo. When they see that Even at least one or two folks can just make a lot of money, numbers three through 200 will believe it, especially if it's visible, if they can feel it, if they can sense it, if they can see it on the leaderboard. So make sure you have a comp plan where the top folks can make a lot of money. Third, if you're not a sales driven culture, celebrate the wins. Make sure that the big logos, the big deals, you have parties, and that your sales team feels like heroes, not a cost center. If you're sales driven, you'll get this. But a lot of folks from engineering type cultures view sales as a cost center and flip that around immediately by celebrating the wins. Fourth, make sure that you have a VP of sales that can recruit successful people. That's really the trick to all of this. If your VP of sales can recruit one or two folks that can hit quota and believe and believe in your product, everything will scale. Maybe it's the secret to everything in sales. But make sure you have a head of sales that can recruit, if not find someone else. And the last one is, don't pretend. Don't pretend things are going well than they are. Don't have crazy low quotas. Don't let folks ramp for a year. The reason everybody knows, everyone knows it's better to have your leads and your efforts focused on a handful of folks that can crush it rather than a ton of folks who can't. And everyone's just pretending there's success. It doesn't work.
