I have just returned from a family vacation in Bali, which I visited for the first time in my life. I had been somewhat apprehensive about visiting Bali with wife and three young kids, as I’d heard many ‘horror’ stories of bad experiences that seem to get the attention of the media.

To my delight, we had the best family holiday ever, largely due to the amazing attitudes and friendliness of the Balinese people in the resort and everywhere we travelled across Bali. The staff at the resort where we stayed in Nusa Dua had a helpful and attentive passion for their job and this created a contagious culture that is rare to find in Australia.

And they must be motivated by more than just money, as the minimum wage in Bali is just over $180/month AUD!

It got me thinking …Why in dealerships in 2016 do I often hear that management are struggling to motivate their sales team in order to increase their performance? That people aren’t hungry or driven to do anything more than just enough.

With new car profitability in 2016 on the decline and a hyper-competitive market, we can’t afford to have any sales team struggling for motivation. Therefore we must be proactive in managing our sales teams differently.

So here are five ways you can motivate your sales team to do more than just enough:

1. Hire motivated people
   The reality is you can’t motivate people who aren’t self-motivated. Rather, you must hire self-motivated people and then continue to inspire them to get the best out of themselves.Whilst good help is hard to find, this doesn’t give us an excuse for hiring the best of a bad bunch only to complain that they aren’t motivated once they finish their probation. The hiring process is vital in ascertaining what motivates and inspires the person you are looking to hire.
2. Expect initiative
   As a key performance indicator, I always recommend to Dealers that they measure more than just the number of sales, gross profit and CSI. If you are going to expect initiative, then you have to expect your sales team to be regularly coming to you in management with new ideas, to be regularly prospecting and to be creating business on their own, not just waiting for the door to swing or the phone to ring. I would also recommend paying an additional bonus for sales won through prospecting, repeat and referral or other initiatives.
3. Don’t allow negativity
   I’m a big believer that if you are going to create a culture of motivation in your sales team, you must have a zero tolerance for the opposite. Negativity is the cancer that will kill motivation in your dealership. A good friend of mine runs a business in the United States. He has a ‘no negativity’ policy in his company, where if someone is caught more than once being negative without giving a solution to the problem, they no longer have a position at his company. Tough but absolutely necessary!
4. Stop running ‘beat-up’ meetings
   Your morning meetings are where your team will either find their motivation or have it instantly smashed. Many dealerships have a morning sales meeting to run through yesterday’s results and smash the team if it didn’t perform. That’s crazy! Instead of going through the numbers, you must run a ‘Jump start meeting’ that motivates and trains the team for the day ahead. In this meeting you will role play, discuss and handle customer objections, provide product news, quiz, share good performance stories and offer assistance to your team with leads.
5. Understand your staff’s motivation
   It’s hard to get your sales team motivated when you don’t know what motivates each individual. Could you tell me what the greatest motivator is to each member of your sales team? Is it spending time with their family, buying a new house, going on a holiday, having a weekend off, being a the No 1 performer, being offered a promotion??? Leadership expert, John Maxwell, says, “Leadership is influence”, and if you want to have influence with your team, you must know what makes them tick in order to remind them of their motivations when times get tough.

I hope you can implement these five techniques and get ready for a more motivated and high performing sales team.

Dave Benson  
CEO/Sales Expert
Reaching Your Potential