Putting a spring in the sales team's step

With a possible upturn around the corner, lacklustre sales teams will be left standing by those full of vim and vigour. We look at ways of re-injecting energy into the sales effort.

Many industry forecasters can see at least a chink of light at the end of the darkest tunnel in IT sales history. Growth, albeit on a small scale, is on its way for 2003.

But many sales teams, rocked by redundancies and demoralised by months of chasing elusive deals, are low on energy.

Months of bad news have taken their toll and morale is down. Which, ironically, may mean that just as a brighter dawn is about to break, some sales teams will not be best placed to face a brighter tomorrow.

As a manager, of course, your job is to pick your team up off the floor and wind them up again, ready to take on the world.

So how can you turn your team from a bunch of battle-weary individuals into the hottest sales force in town?

Have a plan
Leading by example is an obvious way of inspiring your team to become more motivated. Your own enthusiasm for new ideas and initiatives is key to generating positive energy in others.

But effective leadership is also about having vision. You must be able to show clearly what the team needs to achieve in order to ease the company's pain.

"Leaders must be well organised and capable of helping the team to organise itself to accomplish established goals," argues Robert Maddux, author of Team Building (Kogan Page).

"One of the strengths of a good leader is the ability to see a future of the organisation that is better in some important ways than what currently exists.

"This view must then be communicated in such a way that employees can organise their resources to achieve the desired results."

ACTION POINT: Sit down and define your and your team's top-line objectives. Maximum space allowed: 10 bullet points on one side of A4.

Buddy up
Low morale leads to business inertia. This not only affects how the members of your team deal with customers, but how they interact in the office.

So-called 'Buddying', a simple exercise to bring the whole company together, and at the same time get some jobs done that have been hanging around for ages, is a great tonic.

Mandeville Recruitment Group sets great store by its buddying scheme. "We have a motivation day every six months for all staff from all of our offices," explained managing director David Riley.

"It gives us a chance to get together and share our achievements and set our goals for the six months ahead."

A motivational speaker is invited to give the exercise an extra boost. "The main aim was to act as a kick-start to help you get going/get you taking action now with regard to longer-term aims," said Riley.

"Buddies are often people who would have no involvement with each other (senior/junior or from different divisions or locations). So it brought people together and allowed them to hear from someone other than their line manager.

"There was an extremely positive response. Most people did not want to let their buddy down by not calling them for an update or to show support."

ACTION POINT: Start by pairing off people from different departments. If possible, try and put different levels together too. Ask each pair to come up with three goals that they promise to complete in the next month.

The goals themselves must be beneficial to the organisation as a whole, e.g. sprucing up a communal area or producing a new company newsletter. Each person is responsible for seeing that their buddy completes the three goals on time.

Revamp your website
Potential customers form an impression of your company from your online presence that can have far-reaching effects.

One American corporate is said to have cancelled a new business meeting with an IT vendor recently because it was so put off by what it found on the vendor's site.

According to recent research by BBC Training & Development, almost 90 per cent of UK sites randomly tested have fundamental flaws that seriously jeopardise traffic levels from return visitors.

And just as crucially, a poor website can also have a negative influence on how your own staff view their company.

"When I look at our site, I can't believe I work for such a dreary outfit," admitted one marketing professional with an IT consultancy.

"Updating your website copy can help revitalise your staff's own perception of the company," added Jerry Lloyd-Williams, director of website content specialists, Sticky Content Ltd.

"Asking your team to think about how the company should be represented online can act as a real stimulant and improve their perception.

"Focusing on the project, and really having to think about the company's image, can help to raise your team's flagging enthusiasm."

ACTION POINT: Offer a prize to whoever comes up with the best (most cost-effective!) idea for a rapid improvement in the company website.

Tell us a story ...
When heads have dropped in an organisation, it's all too easy for successes to be played down or even overlooked entirely. As football managers say, teams forget how to win.

The frequency of bad news can make even the brightest company bulletins sound gloomy.

"Encouraging your team to come up with case studies can help to give them fresh enthusiasm," explained David Angwin, marketing director of internet security company, Vistorm.

"They are reminded of their own recent achievements. Pulling the case studies together allows them to revisit the details of successful deals and understand what made them winners.

"They are a compelling marketing tool too, showing potential customers how successful your organisation can be in a really relevant way."

Putting these case studies together gives salespeople a credible reason for re-contacting clients. And once written, of course, they can be used as part of the effort to revamp your website, or as part of a general PR push.

ACTION POINT: Encourage individuals to compete to come up with case study suggestions. Circulate case studies published by your rivals too, so that teams can see what they're up against.

Tidy the office
Spring cleaning the office can lift the spirits of the whole company by refreshing dull, drab surroundings and giving them a more positive feel.

The spring clean will not only give the office a fresh look to team members, but will have a subliminal effect on potential and existing customers visiting your premises.

A tidy, ordered office gives the impression of a professional, ordered outfit, while a ramshackle workplace can suggest a shoddy work ethic.

ACTION POINT: Encourage each member of your team to tidy the immediate surroundings in which they work. The task of tidying communal areas, such as staff or meeting rooms, should be shared out evenly.

Training
When athletes are low on energy, they invariably take on some light training to jump-start their metabolism and reinvigorate themselves. Businesses can benefit in the same way.

Training can act as a stimulus, not only to increase knowledge but to boost enthusiasm.

Independent courses run off-site can give jaded staff a chance to get away from the (recently tidied!) office and gain a fresh perspective on their role, and the company as a whole.

But be careful to choose your trainer carefully. When morale is low and energy levels are dropping, training courses can sometimes devolve into group moaning sessions.

ACTION POINT: Make sure that course topics and structure will be designed to promote and enhance positive aspects of your business.

Show how the training is part of your overall game plan. Use them to illustrate your vision of the future and outline how you hope they will contribute to the fulfilment of team goals.

Remember that internal training, run by members of the team, can be just as useful. Try and pick individuals to train on topics in which they have unique strengths.

This will give the trainers confidence talking about their specialist topics and at the same time increase the spread of core skills through the organisation.

Re-present presentation material
Ask team members to come up with improvements to an existing company or sales presentation.

The exercise refocuses staff on identifying the positive aspects of your company. They will naturally rediscover strengths they can exploit in a revitalised market, and weaknesses on which they need to work.

And the project gives them scope to be creative and apply their own individuality to something useful for the whole company.

ACTION POINT: Ask team members to present to each other and mark each other's performance. For a fresh perspective, get them to present each other's material too.

Put the kettle on
If an army marches on its stomach, then an office runs on tea and coffee. Having a well-stocked kitchen, or modern vending machines, as well as somewhere clean and comfortable to sit and relax, is key to keeping staff happy.

"Office morale can be a fragile thing at the best of times," said Penny Herriman, head of account management at advertising agency, BBH.

"I manage a large team and even when things are going well it's all too easy for something trivial to upset the equilibrium.

"Keeping your team happy by feeding them well and giving them a comfortable environment in which to relax is a good start to getting the best out of them, especially if you expect them to work long hours."

ACTION POINT: Circulate a brief refreshment survey to see if there any obvious catering gripes you could easily fix.

Give them an incentive
Offering bonus schemes or commission is often an unrealistic proposition when the market is at a real low. There may simply be not enough deals around to generate the cash to trigger the payments.

But with some creative thinking you can shift the emphasis away from sales bonuses and use incentives to promote pre-sales - not necessarily cash bonuses either.

"I have found that incentives that show understanding of the people involved can be more effective than cash," explained Jason Hill, chief executive of IT management consultants, Programme Control.

"Think about what is important to individual members of your team and then try and match the incentive to their desires.

"Some people like more time off, some love playing golf, others would love dinner for themselves and their partner at a nice restaurant.

"By showing you understand them as individuals, you are more likely to motivate them to work harder for you."

ACTION POINT: Resolve to find out something new about the out-of-work interests and activities of each of your team members.

Call in the experts
If you have a budget to motivate your staff, why not enlist the help of a specialist company? Firms like Active Communications concentrate on helping to unlock the enthusiasm and potential of your employees in imaginative ways.

Some of these might sound far-fetched but they're certainly refreshingly different:

• Having an actor steal food and drink from meeting participants to demonstrate how a business is losing money.
• Training 14 year-olds to present to potential customers to demonstrate the openness and simplicity of a particular proposition.
• Using actors to impersonate board members of your company in order to get ideas over in a particularly animated fashion.

"Now more than ever, the last thing sales teams need is to be told to do more," said Lud Romano, managing director at Alive Communications.

"The first thing they need to be shown is that they are capable of doing more. First grab their attention; surprise them.

"Anybody can do this. Just think about the approach you'd take if you wanted to give your best friend the surprise of his or her life.

"Once you have their attention, prove three things. That the leadership team is very clear about where the business is going. That it's equally as clear about how it's going to get there. And that the sales team are the people who are going to be instrumental in making it happen."

Broadcast news
Using satellite television technology, Xerox has staged a number of pan-European telethon-like sales events - Xerothons - that have generated huge amounts of sales revenue for the company.

In a competitive but fun environment, sales teams battle it out to generate the highest number of sales leads and close the biggest number of deals in a day-long, live event. The first four Xerothons have generated close to $40m in actual sales.

On a smaller scale, companies like Kingston inmedia (which stages the events for Xerox) can help inject some fun and competitive spirit into your sales operation.

"For companies with a large national network of resellers, for example, we can set up a similar, affordable event using satellite or internet technologies," explained Mark Harrison, head of enterprise marketing at Kingston inmedia.

"With real-time broadcasts throughout the day, a company can co-ordinate a nationwide sales event that really enthuses those taking part and gets great results.

"Other clients use our technology in different ways. BMW has an Interactive Business TV network that it uses to broadcast regular sales messages and training information to its staff in 153 dealerships."