If you want to get the most from your team, you need to make sure that they’re motivated and performing at their best.  In this article, we’re taking a look at three ways that you can help to motivate your team to ultimately, sell more cars.

#1 – Incentivize Your Team

Incentives are the fastest way to motivate any salesperson, but we’re not talking about changing their pay scale or tossing an extra $200 their way for selling another car.

We’re talking about incentivizing the process.

Putting in place incentives that reward your team for learning, growing and taking the actions that will ultimately help them to sell more cars.

Rewards for things like increasing:

  • The closing percentage
  • Follow-ups
  • The amount of test-drives taken
  • The contact rates for your BDC
  • The number of appointments set
  • The show rates for appointments

Whatever key metrics you feel are the most important, those are the things that you need to be rewarding.  By rewarding those parts of the process, you help you team improve their overall sales strategy, which inevitably improves your bottom line.

Rewards don’t have to be cash.  Get the whole team involved and offer a gift card to the first sale on a Saturday, or offer dinner and the use of a demo to the person with the highest follow-up percentage that week.  It doesn’t have to even be that big.  You could offer something that doesn’t really cost you a dime, like the option to leave early one day.  The idea is to make the rewards memorable and worth working for.

If you want to take this motivation tip further, set your own personal incentives.  If you want a new watch, set a milestone that you need to reach in order to earn it.  If you want a slice of cheesecake, push yourself to get 10 more test-drives by the end of that week.  By putting incentives in place for yourself, you keep yourself motivated and feel like you earned the treats that you get.

#2 – Praise Your Team

If you’ve ever worked in the car business, you know that the minute that you make a mistake…everyone is talking about it. Praise is a lot harder to come by, and that needs to stop.

Start praising your team.

Praise your team and its members for personal triumphs, good reviews, for learning something new, for getting new referrals, or going the extra mile for a customer or a team member.

It’s so easy, for all of us, to point out what’s going wrong and too often, we as managers, believe criticism will motivate our teams. It won’t. The only thing that criticism, especially publicly, does is demotivate your team and make them want to avoid your meetings and conversations.

Instead of criticism, offer some praise both privately, and publicly. Tell your team what it’s doing right and if you need to point out mistakes, save it for a private conversation.

Praise is a quick, simple and powerful way to motivate your team, use it often.

If you want to take using praise to motivate a little further; learn to praise yourself.  Learn to recognize and celebrate your own wins when you do a good job, or go the extra mile.

Chances are that you’re the first person to get down on yourself if something goes wrong, so you should also be making sure that you’re the first one to celebrate when something goes right.

#3 Educate & Coach Your Team

Managers; you’ve got to commit to being a coach before anything else.  Motivation and coaching go hand in hand, because they need to be done every day to be effective.

Being a manager is not about sitting behind a desk all day, it’s about coaching your team members and managing your team.

Each member of your team needs you to relate to them in a slightly different way.  They need you to offer them support in slightly different ways and even might require you to give them different incentives to perform at their best.

If you want to get the most of our each of your people, you need to learn to relate to each and every one of them, and adapt to what they need from you to perform at their best.

On the flip-side, salespeople, you need to make sure that you’re in a headspace to be coachable.  That means making sure that you’re open minded and ready to be taught and encouraged by your manager.

It means putting your ego aside and really listening to understand, instead of listening to respond.  It also means taking responsibility and measuring your performance, as well as scheduling your 1-on-1s with your manager, instead of making them chase you down.

The bottom line is that everyone on the team (including the manager) needs to remember that you are all part of a team and the manager is there to help you succeed.