Build Up Your Team with Success Stories

It can be hard to know how to motivate your sales team. Performance goes up and down, and even when they’re doing everything right, sometimes the results aren’t showing up. We’ve found that one of the easiest ways to motivate your sales team is to share sales success stories. With all the changes happening around us, sometimes a story with a happy ending is all someone needs to keep up the momentum.

Here are four simple ways to share success stories.

1. Share Small Wins Daily

As a sales leader, your daily communications with your team are critical to their focus and motivation. Are you inspiring and motivating them?

Here at CFS, we like to speak to people's bigness, rather than their smallness. What does this mean? It means try to give attention to the areas of someone's hard work that will build them up and motivate them, rather than make them regress or feel discouraged.

For example: let's say a salesperson has made many minor detail-oriented mistakes. At the same time, they've also improved their communications with clients. Rather than harp on the detail-oriented mistakes, we'd suggest that you focus on their improvements in communication. This doesn't mean that you should completely ignore the person's mistakes, but that instead you should spend more time building them up and celebrating their improvements.

To put this in practice, we suggest that at least a few times a week, sales managers share the small wins they've seen. Maybe a person on your team got a meeting with a prospect they’ve been trying to track down for weeks. Or someone went for no with a prospect that had gone radio silent and heard back.

It doesn't have to be a closed deal, though that’s obviously a great thing to celebrate! Sharing the smaller success stories that occur on the way to winning a deal is a great way to motivate your sales team.

2. Start From The Top

In some organizations, top performers are not encouraged to share their secret sauce for success. But we disagree with this notion.

If top performers share their personal success stories and strategies for wins, they are helping foster a collaborative learning culture and are contributing to a larger legacy of success for the organization. By being communicative, they set a precedent of openness and adaptability, which trickles down to the rest of the team.

In other words, it's of mutual interest for the top performers to offer advice, share stories, and be communicative about how they work. They will hear from other top performers, which will be beneficial to them and to the ever-evolving organization. This is what sharing wins is all about!

Does your company have an intentional practice for knowledge transfers? Sign up for our upcoming webinar on how storytelling can improve companywide communication and alignment.

In conclusion, encourage your top performers to share! This will get others on board for sharing wins.

3. Document & Discuss Sales Success Stories

One of the best ways to share sales success stories with your team is to document them in a simple, accessible place, such as your Sales PlayBook.

As you are developing your Sales PlayBook, create an area for people to share success stories, and document some best practices for how to write a sales success story.

You may want to seed the Sales PlayBook with a few success stories to get things started. It can be helpful to facilitate work sessions with your team to identify the best success stories to add to the PlayBook and start to outline them.

But to get the most out of your sales success stories, it’s not enough just to get them into the PlayBook–you need to get them into the minds of your team. Spend some time in your sales team meetings sharing success stories, asking questions of the people involved, and discussing what helped them win the business. This will help the team internalize the stories so they are able to share them when they are meeting with their own prospects.

Hearing about what worked for their teammates can help motivate your sales team to work for the same results!

4. Acknowledge Contributions

A great way to motivate your sales team is to develop a culture of gratitude. Acknowledging the contributions people make to the sales team and sales process helps to build that culture.

Maybe the marketing team worked above and beyond to develop a presentation for a key prospect. Or the product team developed a customization that helped win a big deal. Or an executive assistant is able to establish a friendly and welcoming rapport when scheduling clients (for virtual meetings! Impressive!)

Spend some time in your sales team meetings acknowledging contributions made by people outside the sales team. Ask your team to point them out as well. Publicly thank people when they make contributions, and nurture a culture of gratitude.

This will help motivate your sales team to work together to achieve success. After a year of feeling so disconnected, there's no better way to try and reconnect than through open communication, sharing positivity, and expressing your gratitude to your team.

What tips do you have for motivating your sales team? We’d love to see them in the comments!