What does it take to inspire employees to sell for your company?
What if this was done in a way that leaves people and employees empowered to do so and based on choice?
How can you do this?
Want to inspire employees to sell? Be sure you’ve found the right employees first.
One of the questions I get asked a lot is how do you inspire employees to sell for your company? How do you get employees to sell for you?
And the first thing to get is some people are just not going to want to sell.
They have no interest in it and they have no real long-term objective or mission or context in their lives that gives any kind of motivation or inspiration to sell. And you may want to back off from that.
And at least you’re clear about expectations then because you can’t really lead a horse to water. The horse doesn’t want to drink, that’s one thing, but most of the time I invite you to be really quite surprised to find out that people actually really have a motivation to sell.
And you’ve just got to find out what that is, and then make the connections. So what do I mean by that? For example, some people, their motivation long-term in your company is to aspire to a higher-level leadership position. To become a good leader, guess what, you have to sell. You have to learn how to sell.
Want to inspire employees to sell? Uncover their long-term motivation.
Now, if you tell them this, they will probably resist you. So there’s a way of selling the idea. So you’ve got to demonstrate your own ability to sell this idea. Be a great leader and guide them toward seeing the connection between sales and leadership.
So how I would do it is, for example, the person’s name was John.
“John, I’m curious to know. So you say your top objective is to get promoted and be okay. Or a manager and this company really your word is to be a leader. Is that right question to see?”
“Yes,” said John.
“John, what do you think are some of the primary skills that you need to learn to become a good leader?”
“Sunil, I think I got to learn how to engage people and coach them and mentor them and probably inspire them to move forward,” said John.
“What do you think it would take to inspire people? What skill sets would you need?,” said Sunil.
“I see where you’re going, Sunil. So I guess, selling or inspiring people. Yeah,” said John.
Perhaps I’m not, I don’t want to force it on him. So I want to back off a little bit and let him think through it.
“What do you think, John? What do you think, how do you think learning how to sell would really teach you how to lead better? If you look at the people who are good leaders, what do you think?
How do you think learning how to sell has affected their ability to lead? And so you want to ask them those kinds of questions, but first, you got to find out what they really want.”
In this example, it’s leadership.
It could be other things, it could be that they want to learn how to manage their clients better while they seek to manage their clients better, to manage the customer’s complaints better, or their customer service better.
Then they got to still learn how to sell. So you want to find out first, what are the motivating principles in their life? And if there are none that you can make a connection with sales, then you may not be able to do anything.
And anything, as I said, at least it’s good to find that out. But if there is something like in the domain of leadership that they want to aspire to better at customer sales, better at handling certain objections so that life can be easier.
If they want to make more money, for example, they may have to learn how to sell. If they want to take over the company some time and be a CEO, guess what got to learn how to sell. So the key thing is really to find out what they want. And I know for some of you, this may sound a little abstract.
If you find what that motivating factor is, it gets a lot easier because all you need to do is get out of their way and let them get trained because they’re hungry for it.
If you want to inspire your employees to sell, contact me or follow me on LinkedIn.
Since 1991, I’ve been reflecting on, designing, and implementing methodologies and systems for bringing a transcendent, creative and innovative approach to critical aspects of entrepreneurship.
