FAQ: Can sales training change my team’s motivations levels and get them to want to sell?

In his book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, author Daniel Pink discusses how most people are not motivated to work by money, but rather by the positive effects that work has on their mental and emotional state.

Motivation categories

These motivations can be divided into three main categories:

• Autonomy is achieved when people are allowed to work for themselves, rather than being constantly told how to work and what to do by a manager. Several studies have shown that when people are interested in their work they are more productive, creative and perform better. An easy way to create this interest is by allowing your team to work in their own personal way towards the wider goal.
• Mastery is a sense of achieving greatness at something and the sense of wellbeing that comes from knowing you are good at a task. The best sales people know they are good and this sense of mastery motivates them to keep performing to the best of their ability.
• Purpose is perhaps the most important motivation and underpins the other two. Without a purpose, individuals will flounder at work, being unclear of their place in the company and wider society.

What has that to do with sales training?

At LiveseySolar, we agree that sales motivation is not a function of money and rather of the three principles of mastery, purpose and autonomy. The key to helping your team become more motivated at work is by taking every opportunity to engage these three principles for each individual.

Mastery

Mastery is perhaps the simplest function to achieve – sales training can help with mastery but if there is no underlying purpose and autonomy at work is not granted, the team’s motivation will remain untapped.

Purpose

We aim for our sales training not only to be a path to mastery but also to motivate and inspire your team. One way we get people to see a purpose in what they do is to ask them if they think they offer a good product or service.

Helping your team members to understand the wider impact of the products and services they sell and how they can help people is one of our motivational sales training techniques. Once this is achieved, each individual can feel they truly have a purpose in the job of selling.

Autonomy

Autonomy is often influenced by mastery, in that a person who is good at their job is more likely to be trusted to manage their own time. However, it is down to each individual organisation to choose how they decide to manage their team and the level of influence that managers have in work processes.

As we have previously discussed, sales training can enable partial or temporary motivation but is only part of the puzzle of creating a motivated workforce. Comprehensive and long-term motivation is the result of many factors, of which adequate sales training is only one.