Not long ago I shared with you my ideas about the monetary ways to motivate your marketing team. Some say that money rules the world and in some way, I must agree. However, there are still so many ways to motivate your marketing or sales teams to work better, faster and more effectively. Today I will share some idea on how to keep your team motivated.
Of course, many people wake up every morning and go to work just for money. But every day I meet more and more people who put other things on top of money, and they appreciate other things that can motivate them.
Education
If you think of this, the first thing coming to your mind is why my marketing or sales need an education. They just need to pick up the phone and call the customers or brainstorm some new ideas on how to attract new customers. That’s how many C-suits think and that really makes me sad.
The truth is that fo many salesmen or marketers it is of great importance to improve their knowledge, level up what they already know, level up their own market value. For such employees education is a much better education than salary rise or some fishy KPI.
If you motivate your team with some educational seminars, forums, conferences, you might get really unexpected results. They can learn new marketing and sales techniques, meet new people from a similar or close industry, share some ideas. And in this case, we have a win-win situation – the company has highly educated employees, who are ready to implement something new and show better results in marketing or sales, and the employees have new experience and knowledge.
Such an approach may cost the company several thousands of US dollars per year, but the outcome will cover the investment many times. And I want to underline that this is an investment, not expenses like many managers think.
Try to find the best programs together with your employees so this is not just your decision but a mutual one. In this case, your team is more likely to perform even better. Make an annual schedule for all your educational programs, decide on your goals and set them to live.
Challenge
Almost every person engages in some competitions every now and then. It might be a challenge with your neighbor who has a better car or house, it might be who visited more countries, etc. Every single marketer or a salesman like a competition or a challenge.
So you need to think of something that can challenge your teams. This might be anything that can make them work with fire in their eyes. Just some of the challenges you can try:
- Complicated project
- Important customer
- The task other teams failed with
- Time shortage challenge
- etc
Recognition
This one is closely connected with the challenge. I’ve never met a person who doesn’t like to be recognized for their achievements. For some employees, recognition can be more important than money.
They just like to be appreciated by their colleagues and management. If they complete some project, find the new customer or generate some one-million ides, then you need to thank them. Especially such employees like when it is done in public when their colleagues can hear it.
Such people want to feel important, they want everything they do to be recognized. It is important for them to understand that they do not waste their time doing some unnecessary work.
As good as it might be this kind of motivation has a negative side a well. As you can see it might seem and feel like you want to pick the favorite employee or team and grow their ego. In time such employees might think that they are really special and they have to be treated differently. And this is the time when they stop working at all, just bragging how important they are.
Their colleagues as well might feel that their work is useless because they are never being recognized for their input, and this is the time they stop working too because they are sure that no matter how hard their work they will never be thanked for that.
So this is the motivation you have to use wisely.
Awards
You can organize some sort of a monthly/quarter/annual competition with some set of awards. For sales this can be:
- Highest sales
- Number of new customers
- Number of product sales in pieces
- Fastest order
- Number of purchase orders
- etc
For your marketing team you can use:
- Number of leads
- Number of website visits
- Conversion rate
- Brand awareness
- Organic search growth
- Cost of customer acquisition
- etc
Depending on how many people you have in marketing and sales teams you can have 3 prizes or just one prize per period. You know your employees so you can easily work out the prizes list, or you can ask for help from your colleagues. As a matter of fact, you can run from time to time some sort of questionnaire to get to know your employees desires better.
Based on the acquired knowledge, your company revenues, etc. the prize fund can include:
- Latest electronics (TV, tablet PC, smartphone, kitchenware, entertainment systems, etc.)
- Educational courses (sales, marketing, financial planning, foreign languages, acting classes)
- Travel stuff (suitcase, plane tickets, train tickets, hotel stay, etc)
- Books (marketing, sales, business, fiction, non-fiction, comic books, manga, magazines subscription)
- Official day-off
- Entertainment (movie/theater/concert/museum/etc tickets)
As you can see, there are so many different options for prizes, so it works for you for many years to come. And this doesn’t have to be expensive.
So basically these are some of the non-monetary ways to motivate your employees. I will continue to share with you this list in the future. So far I guess this will be enough for you to try and test some of the offered methods.
Stay tuned and motivated!
