Preventing Missed Sales Opportunities with Management and Motivation

It’s easy to spot a missed opportunity after it has passed you by. What’s more difficult is identifying them before they exist to make absolutely certain that you can take advantage of them.

Think for a moment about your sales team. In essence, every day for your team is a series of opportunities, a set of moments where they either move closer to or farther from making a sale. It’s the supervisor’s responsibility to know which direction they’re going, and to steer them in the right one when necessary.

One way to do this is to establish a reporting system for your sales team that allows you to know what they’re doing and what results they’re getting. Don’t wait until a sloppy mistake means an opportunity is missed, either. Act early to prevent bad behaviors, rather than focusing on them after a problem arises.

One way of preventing missed results is to make sure that your employees are invested in their work. Every company and department has goals, but why should an individual salesperson be motivated by the company’s interests? That can only happen when the interests of the company and the sales force are aligned with the interests of the salesperson.

You may not even know your people’s goals. It’s likely that you have an idea of what their goals are at work, in part because a lot of people have similar work goals, but what motivates your salespeople in the larger sense? Providing for their families? Travel and vacations? Maybe a much-needed home improvement? Sit down with your people, and talk with them about their personal goals. Leave what they want to do for you out of it, and concentrate on how they’d spend their bonus money, or their added free time. Once you know what your people care about, it’s simple to align their personal goals with business goals that will motivate them to succeed.

By managing the behavior of your sales force and motivating them to succeed on their own terms, you can go a long way toward preventing missed opportunities for sales before they happen.

Brian Kavicky

Connect with Brian Kavicky

For 25 years, Lushin has guided business leaders toward intentional, predictable growth.

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