8 Ways to Motivate Your Sales Team After a Rough Patch

Hey, Sasser. I know for many of us these feel like the best of times. In SaaS, the market's at the all time high. There's 500 SaaS and cloud unicorns. But you're going to have some tough quarters, maybe even a year from hell. Things are not always going to be easy. And what do you do? How do you hold the sales team together through a rough patch? Let me give you eight ideas on how to motivate the sales team after a rough month or quarter. Do it right. They'll stick with you, they'll believe. If they believe in you and they believe in the product and they believe in what they've done, they'll stick through a tough patch. But you have to take action. So the number one thing you can do to inspire a sales team after a rough patch is deliver them a killer feature. One they've been asking for. Sales gets a lot of no's and whether that feature gap, that top feature gap is a real reason for a no, or it's an excuse. They hear it all the time. If only you integrated with Salesforce. If only you integrated with Zapier. If only you had this, if you only had that. Deliver it for the team, deliver it for them. Show them you have their back. Deliver them this quarter a killer feature that they can sell. Ask the sales team what's the number one feature we could ship now or this quarter that will help you close more deals and go ship it, go ship it. They'll sell it, they'll believe it and it will happen. Second thing you can do during a tough time is promote your number one replacement. Um, this almost always works. Uh, even in tougher times, we usually find that the best rep is still doing okay. The best rep knows how to optimize the sales process, how to deal with issues, how to, how to answer those tough questions from prospects, how to beat the competition. So even if the rest are struggling, the number one often is still making it. So promote them if they want to. Not every AE wants to be a team lead or a director. But in tough times, ask your number one rep if they're ready, if they want to step up for promotion. And if they do promote them, it shows everyone it can happen and they will become an instant leader for the company and pull you through a tougher time. Third thing you can do with your sales team that not enough folks do is just ask them. Ask them what you can do to do a bit better. A killer feature can help. More leads can help, which is the next point we'll talk about, but ask them, engage them in this process. Ask them what you could do to help them more. You'll get a lot of short term answers. You'll get a lot of answers that would have helped on a deal yesterday or next week. But they know even though there's a lot of noise when you ask your sales team and you have to filter that noise, they know what it takes to help them close better. Number four, get the sales team more leads. It always works. So look, this is easy to say get them more leads, right? Everyone want more leads, but how do you do it? The number one thing you can do if the sales team is having a rough patch is go hire a real VP of demand gen. Maybe you have one, maybe. But if you have a great VP demand gen, then if you work with him or her, you can just get more leads with a little more money, a little more attention, a little more time. So if you truly have a great head of demand gen, just spend more time with them so that you can increase the qualified lead, say 20% more this quarter so you can deliver more for the sales team to call on to follow up with. But if you have a head of marketing that's really ahead of corporate marketing, ahead of product marketing, a generic marketer that doesn't really, really an expert in demand gen, well, it's time show the sales team you care. Show the sales team you will feed them, you will get them more leads and it's finally time go hire a real VP demand gen that can have a lead commit or an opportunity commit or some sort of commit to the sales team so the sales team knows they're getting more help. Point five, when it's a tough time for the sales team is it's okay to modestly reset the plan. You can't do this every quarter. You can't constantly reset the plan, but sometimes resetting it a bit just for a quarter or even just for a month in some fashion that is rational, that makes sense, right? Or maybe you make it up in the next quarter. It's not just a gimme, but if a plan is too aggressive, it's okay to be honest and sit down with the team and say, look, we set too tough a plan this quarter. For one quarter we're going to try and just hit 90% of what we plan to. This won't solve underlying issues, but if everything else is going okay and it's a stressful patch, it will relieve the team if you do it once. If you modestly reset the plan once but it's got to be like one time, one time every eight quarters max. Okay? The next thing you can do, and you'll mostly get this, but sometimes it can be counterintuitive. The number one way you can or the next way you can really help the sales team is to let the worst one or two reps go. Just move them out. This always works. It works for two reasons, a quantitative and a qualitative reason. The quantitative reason letting your forced one or two reps go is they're wasting your precious leads. We talked just, just before this about getting your reps more leads. The best way, the simplest, fastest way you can do it this week is redistribute the leads from your worst reps to better reps they'll have. Not only will they have more leads each, but they will close more out of them. We wrote a post on Saster a while back about how net net the best reps often can close nine times what the worst ones can and often three to four times what the pretty good ones can. So just think about redistributing your leads to the better reps. Magic happens. And the simplest way to do that is just to move on from your worst one or two reps. Maybe they're nice, maybe you like them, maybe you want to give them more time. But don't. Don't. In a rough patch, you can carry more mediocre reps. When times are good, It's a fact. It's true in any department, you can carry more mediocre everything. When times are good, it happens. But when times are tough, get rid of your worst one or two reps, give them to the rest, and magic happens. It also improves morale. You don't want a sales team where some of the folks are deeply struggling. It's bad enough in normal times, but in tough times, it can be. It can be infectious in a bad way. People start to say, maybe that could be me. Maybe, maybe we're all struggling together. But getting rid of those one or two reps that don't perform anyway, it generally is a morale boost. And everyone knows. Everyone knows they're not doing well. Especially in sales, when there's usually a dashboard right inside of Salesforce people can see. But even if they can't, they know. So fewer, better reps can help you get you out of a tough spot. The last two points drive NPS up. Sales won't ask for this, but it always works. It will always work over a couple of quarters. Drive NPS up, start measuring it, do more Surveys, figure out what it is and set a goal. Set a goal to go from 20 to 40 or 30 to 50 or 40 to 50. It almost doesn't really matter as long as you measure it properly and you strive and you make it a top company goal to increase it. Because everyone will know what to do. Sales will know what to do. Customer success, engineering product. Anyone reasonably close to a customer will have ideas to drive NPS up. And as you drive NPS up, customer happiness, good things happen. They refer more of their friends. They tweet more, they blog more, they tell their friends more. They, they, they go on WhatsApp groups and Facebook groups and they say, your product is great. It always works. Driving NPS up does not get you more leads next week, but it can help you in the following quarter after you get through this rough patch. The very last point in tough times is lead from the front. I mean, this should be obvious, but I see the opposite too many times I see CEOs hide when sales hits a rough patch. No. Get on more zooms. Jump in. Force yourself to do six to ten zooms with customers and prospects a week and give your sales team cards. Tell them each you'll do 10 zooms with prospects or customers each week and let them pick. Let the sales team. If you have a head of sales, give them to her. Give them cards or slots. But say, Look, I'm doing 10 prospect calls a week. Use me however you want, small, medium and large. First call, tenth call, eighth call, stuck deal, upsell down, sell left, sell right, sell. I'm here for you ten times a week. The team will get it. This is the simplest way to lead from the front. You want your leaders to lead from the front in tough times. And the easiest way to do it in sales is get on those zooms and maybe later jets when we can too. But get on the zooms, give them cards. And if they have cards, if they all know they have a quota, I get, I get two zooms with the CEO a week. They'll use them. And it leads from the front. And also the great thing about it is it works. Customers and prospects love to talk to the CEO. They love it. Even if the CEO of a 10 person company, a 20 person company, 100 person company, those three letters are magic. I know when we're startups, we sometimes don't even take the title seriously. CEO of a 15 person company. Oh hooray. But you know what your customers do? Your customers care. They've put a lot of time into testing this application qualifying it, sometimes betting a little bit of their career that it will work. And as great as it is to talk to sales, it's super comforting to talk to the CEO. It's respectful and the answers are good and they can see that they have a future with the vendor and they can see they have someone to talk to and that respects them. So it's magic. Don't hide from bad sales. Go help the team zoom and talk to your top customers. Give yourself a quota to them so they know they can bring you into ten zooms a week. Start doing a weekly webinar. Do what the Clubhouse folks do every week on Clubhouse. If you go on, there's a weekly webinar where everyone can talk to the founders. Go do that. Do a weekly webinar where any customer can talk to. Do a customer conference. Do whatever you can to lead from the front. When you lead from the front, the sales team will get it. They'll believe more. And no matter what, you're almost always do better next quarter.