If you have a direct sales team, one thing you may have to do occasionally is help motivate your team and get them going. This can be difficult if you do not know what their goals are or what they want to accomplish. Thankfully, it can be relatively easy to ask them this question.
The first thing you need to be able to do to motivate them is to know what they want to accomplish. Do they want to make sales, recruit or do something else like fundraisers? What are they currently doing? What is holding them back from doing something if they are not doing anything? If you do not know what they want, you cannot provide ideas.
Next, give them ideas or create challenges for them to make these goals. For instance, if they want fundraisers but they have not approached anyone, challenge them to approach five people in the next week. They may protest that they do not know five people that would want a fundraiser but they could be surprised. Ask if they know anyone involved in sports, in music, or even anyone who may be battling an illness and could use some extra funds to help pay medical bills. These are all people they could potentially approach about a fundraiser. Is everyone going to jump at the chance to do a fundraiser – no – but, it will help the person get comfortable talking about it and you never know what may come of it.
Make sure to check in with them a week later or whatever deadline you set to find out how it went. If they were successful, congratulate them and ask them how it felt, if they feel confident doing that going forward and possibly give them another challenge. If they were not successful, ask them what happened. Was it something they chose not to do, did they ignore the challenge or did something come up in life that just prevented them from being to do this? Maybe you can re-challenge them or change the challenge a bit to make it easier for them.
