BUSINESS EXPRESS RESULTS THROUGH MOTIVATION

BUSINESS EXPRESS RESULTS THROUGH MOTIVATION

MOTIVATION IS GOOD It seems evident does it not? Yet motivation has attracted around itself a sort of a bad reputation. How? By being permanently linked to financial issues such as salaries, the company car, the phone and all the other perks. It is not possible to brush off these items, but motivation is not an objective feeling. It fuels itself on many different feelings and attitudes in the workplace. Often, when there is a motivation problem, the salesperson feels his conditions should be better because he is unhappy at work. It is more an attempt to rationalize than anything else. Take the great football player Ronaldinho for example. He was quite a poor player when at the PSG team (Paris). The trainer Luis Fernandez did not even get him to play that much. A few years later, he is a star at the FC Barcelona. What happened? The Paris team trainer had strict rules regarding going out at night. For Ronaldinho, a Brazilian, it was simply impossible to stay home. He was unhappy, playing averagely, and in the end on the bench. He sure was highly paid, but it just did not do it. In Barcelona, noone cares if he goes out at night. He disciplines himself alone, and he gets great results. Working with motivated people is great. 99% of the people can be motivated, and they end up contributing to your success with in the end much less effort and costs from your part. info@nmmanagement.com for consulting and coaching solutions 2

MATERIAL NEEDS The feeling of comfort is strongly linked to the material conditions that the company provides its team members. This is always quite difficult to balance out as it is not possible to provide unlimited raises. In areas where the cost of living explodes, such as Bratislava, you may face a situation in which the people who work for you have a hard time making ends meet. Of course, it is the case of plenty of people in the world and in Slovakia. But at certain points, it becomes simply unbearable. You have to keep in mind that for families, the importance of material needs grows. As an individual, a satisfied and happy employee is ready to sacrifice and makes his own decisions. That changes when getting married and heaving children. The needs are not for the individual but for the family, and the eventual gap between what could be earned in another company and your own becomes harder to defend as the individual thinks not only about himself but about his family, and his family also pressures more or less visibly. Material needs are hard to express because the employee is sometimes worried about seeming too demanding and ungrateful. The needs are also hard to express because the employee is worried that his management will reject his needs using past failures or gaps between his achievements and company objectives. So it is all buried deep down until suddenly there is an opening and a competitor proposes a great job at better conditions. The pressure for taking that job coming from his family is enormous and even if you manage well, an important gap between what you propose and what is achievable is hard to overcome. What to keep in mind in all this? We recommend a set of basic rules that you should set for yourself. - market value of the team member (average salary, estimated salary for high performers, lower limits) - needs of your team member (getting married, children are on the way ) - have a payment system that differenciates strongly between average performers and top performers in order to protect those who provide the strongest results. - Implement a small tracking system of the conditions provided to your team: fixed salary, bonuses, other advantages Be aware of the financial problems of your team members. Try to find out if they are long term or short term. Long term financial problems are severe and can eventually push someone to unethical behaviour. Your best attitude is always to reserve some quality time with your team. Do not be afraid of small talk and the material needs of your team will appear clear. It will then be up to you to decide the conditions you wish to provide. info@nmmanagement.com for consulting and coaching solutions 3

TIP: Paying sales teams The basic item of most systems consists of a target. That target is the amount that you consider reasonable to reach and for which you are willing to pay more money to reward the salesperson for having generated profitability for yourself. For the target to work, there has to be a big change as soon as the target is reached. This means that the salary is quite basic until the target is reached and bonuses are provided. There seem to be three schools of thought for setting targets and bonuses. The first one considers that salespoeple should be paid on a fixed base with no bonuses so that they are not pressured into selling what they want and not what the customer needs. The second school of thought considers that salespoeple should be judged on team results only so that they will not try to monopolize a customer and create tension in the workplace. The third believes that individual objectives should be set. Every system has its benefits and inconveniences. The first one overlooks that salespoeple bring back profitability, so they should be paid accordingly But if you choose to pay a fixed rate, then they may not be motivated to find enough customers for the profitability to be delivered. And what generates revenue are the extra-sales, not the ones done almost automatically by advertising and just being there. The second system relieves tension in the workplace. It has the inconvenience however of blending the most succesful salespeople in the general results. The best suffer from the results of the less succesful ones. Your most succesful salespeople are underpaid and the less succesful are well overpaid. The third system is the best one in our opinion: indiividual targets that allow each salesperson to benefit from his work. This system leads you to pay highly the best, and much less the others. And After all, it is the extra effort of a part of your team that have the impact on your profitability moreover if you benefit from bonuses from your suppliers. info@nmmanagement.com for consulting and coaching solutions 4

PROFITABILITY IN VOLUME SALES Sales resulting from marketing, advertsing, customer trafic. BASIC SELLING REQUIREMENTS Sales resulting from good technicity, and positive attitudes with customers. YOUR EXPECTATIONS Extra work leading to an above average number of sales. YOUR SUPER SALES PEOPLE I have noticed that in many cases we think that the product and the marketing that surrounds it is the most important factor of sales. This is of course absolutely incorrect even though it has always been easier to sell cheap, high quality and desired products than the contrary. Because of that misconception, many companies are not switching to individual targets and they are not making the distinction between the average sales people and the above average. Most of your profitability comes from making the extra-sales that are the result of hard work, and often individual work. We strongly believe that any payment system for salespeople should be a reasonable fixed amount, and strong increase when a target is reached (retro-active bonuses for example). This creates the stimulation for each team member to do the extra work to get his target done because selling more than the target has extreme financial consequences for the salesperson. Share the profitability with those who contribute to it info@nmmanagement.com for consulting and coaching solutions 5

NON-MATERIAL NEEDS Too many managers over look the other needs of their team members. It is important to understand that 99% of the people need also the feeling of liking their job. And they like their job because they like doing it with the people with whom they are doing it. The manager has a significant impact on this. 1) Respect and Justice: the fundamentals Non-discrimination Discrimination is the worst working environment you can have. It is impossible for a manager to accept this situation, and actions based on racial or gender must be monitored and severly reprimanded if persistent or out of line. The person attacked can defend himself, but in your working environment that you manage, he or she needs to feel support on these complicated issues. Constructive and non-personal crticism There is nothing worse than being blamed for either something we did not do or are not responsible for. It is a touchy subject: we hand out responsibility but hand out as well the possibility of making a mistake. We need our teams to take responsibilities because in many cases, they are in a better situation to take the best decision than we are. The first one being that sometimes, they need to act immediately if they want to sell a product or take care of a customer. They will make mistakes some because of their own misjudgment of the situation, some because some information was not known to them and they should have checked with you, and some because of not having paid attention. Occasionnally, they will just be blamed for other people s mistakes. If you want people to continue taking responsibilities, you have to act on their unwanted mistakes accordingly which means: - no anger when mistakes are made for the first time - balanced reaction according to the severity of the mistake - no shooting the messenger (when attacking the one reporting the problem, and not the origin of ther problem) - warn but do not threaten - comments centered on wrong decision of the person responsible and not the person in itself - explaining what should have been done and why - not coming back on the mistake once dealt with the team member - never criticizing in public If the mistake is done a second time, you may repeat the above with a warning. info@nmmanagement.com for consulting and coaching solutions 6

TIP: Difference between a threat and a warning WARNING Make sure that from now on you control the invoice because this mistake costs the company a lot of money. We will not accept a second time. THREAT Next time you mess up, you are fired! Next time, go the workshop with the customer and explain the customer s problem to the service manager there instead of only pointing the direction. What do you think we pay you for!! When I give you a deadline, I expect you to respect it. Do not mess with me or you will be sorry! Non-exclusion There was an experience in the 1960 s in America in which a group of students were participating in a fake visual perception test. The concept was simple: they were presented a line on the left of a board and should choose out of 4 possible answers drawn on that same board which line proposed had the same length as the one on the left. Easy? Not so. Out of the four students, three were in fact part of the experiment. They would answer all the same answer that was evidently false. At the beginning, the studied person responds correctly, but then he answers like the rest of the group. Not one studied person managed to keep giving the right answers. This just shows the anxiety of not belonging to the group. In companies, the situation happens that some people become isolated or the target of all jokes and criticism. A little internal joking is always OK as long as everyone gets his turn or that the situation does not continue endlessly. We sometimes fail to see how slowly it is driving the spirit of our team member downward. Because the jokes are sometimes funny and it seems to create a team spirit. It certainly does, but only against one of the team members. As the manager, you are to correct any situation that gets out of hand. - criticism in public by his colleagues is damaging. Stop all lynchings of the team member and make it clear to all that you are the one who has the right to critcize. - do not criticize a team member in front of his peers. - put forward to all others the accomplishments of each team member, especially the ones that are the subject of criticism. - stop repetitive jokes by sending back a comment to the joke maker or simply saying that is enough. info@nmmanagement.com for consulting and coaching solutions 7

2) Stimulating atmosphere Positive environment Let others feel positive because you yourself are. You should always be an optimist with your team members. Being an optimist does not mean being a village idiot. There are problems, and you seek to deal with them and to solve them. But keep everyone s attention on the glass that is half-full. Never criticize your upper management. If you show to your team evident mistrust with owners or higher management of your company, you will stir doubts and anxiety in their minds. Always discuss problems but only about possible solutions and not the non-ending list of consequences that bring everybody down. Show solutions and counter-examples that illustrate how things are never as dark as they seem. Your contribution as a manager is essential we will never say it enough. Make the experience fascinating Making the job interesting is also the manager s motivation task. We put more energy in what we like. If you show passion for the job and for their job, you will see that they will too. Share non-confidential information on the goals and challenges of the company, demonstrate how important it is to reach targets and show every day that you are following the results. Demonstrate with practical examples how each of the team members did a great deal for the company by doing very simple things. It is important to be part of a group, an adventure, a project, and of course of a winning team. That environment has to be created: Create a team spirit based on challenge and team accomplishments. Celebrate good sales, the end of a busy promotional event, arrival of new products or new people. Sharing experience A stimulating environment is also one where the working conditions include the feeling of coming home smarter every evening. An environment in which the manager is a coach and contributes to the personal success of each team member is a stimulating one. It is not that complicated moreover: it is really about discussing the business and ways to achieve success on the projects you and the team member are working on. Managers that let the salespeople work out all the details are not fully filling in their mission. But do not forget that discussion also means giving your team member time for him to express his view of the situation. It will force him to think about the best steps to take with the project and feel more professional. info@nmmanagement.com for consulting and coaching solutions 8

CONCLUSION Of course this guide does not claim to be the solution to all motivation problems. We have only reviewed some of the factors that contribute to a stimulating atmosphere that leads people to deliver their best. We are convinced at NM MANAGEMENT that companies have immense ressources still available in their people. And that we can strongly increase our results by transforming people going to do their work into people going to work. Let s talk about it some time. info@nmmanagement.com for consulting and coaching solutions 9