Tips To Keep Your Field Reps Engaged

Dave Oury is the president and managing partner of Medical Leverage, a healthcare communications company.

If only you could bottle the energy that follows a sales training event. Afterward, salespeople are excited and motivated about their work. Their numbers take a big jump. And you can even see it in their faces: they love being at work. 

However, the “pep rally” effect that occurs after a sales training event doesn’t last forever. In my experience, it expires around the one-month mark. After that, fatigue begins to creep back in, and numbers slump in tandem with sagging motivation. While this lag in motivation may be inevitable, as leaders, we have the ability to keep our salespeople engaged and extend this energizing effect. 

As Leaders, It’s Our Job To Keep Our People Motivated 

Sales is a taxing profession. While the job can be rewarding and exciting, some aspects of it can be monotonous, grinding work. Giving the same presentations over and over, hearing crickets from leads, and maintaining an outwardly bright attitude through it all gets frustrating after a while. 

Once fatigue sets in, a snowball effect of negative results follows. Apathy in a salesperson affects their ability to close sales, which leads to further frustration, and the cycle spirals deeper into low numbers and shaken confidence. 

It’s our job as leaders to refill our salespeople with the energy, excitement and motivation they need to keep going strong, both for our businesses’ bottom lines and our salespeople’s mental health. 

If you want to keep your sales team engaged and excited all year long, here are some tactics to add into your year-long management strategy.

1. Empower Your Sales Managers 

Your sales managers are the ones interacting with your field reps every day. More than likely, if your team is disengaged, your sales manager hasn’t been trained in ways to keep them energized. Invest in leadership training for your sales managers, so they’ll be able to be coaches and cheerleaders for their teams. 

Also, sales managers often get bogged down with paperwork instead of doing the critical work of interacting with the salespeople directly. Help your sales managers prioritize their time so they can work hand-in-hand with your sales team four days a week, and corral the paperwork to one day only. Make sure activities like ride-alongs with sales reps, goal setting, frequent checkpoints, and immediate feedback are on the schedule every week. 

2. Infuse Adult Learning Principles Into Your Training 

Just like children have different learning styles, adults do, too. To get adults engaged in your sales training, employ the principles of adult learning. Your sales reps must be able to connect what they’re learning to their lives to truly engage. Use lots of real-world examples, and have your salespeople participate in exercises instead of just listening to a presenter. Adult learning is done best when it’s highly interactive, as long-term memory is enhanced when subjects are presented in an immersive manner. 

3. Connect Your Team To Its Higher Purpose 

Nothing is more motivating than knowing the product you’re selling is actually changing lives. If you can, find a way to connect your reps to the people who actually use their product. Interview customers whose lives have changed for the better because of your product. Knowing that they’re doing some good in the world adds a new layer of meaning, and therefore motivation, to your salespeople’s workday. 

4. Sharpen Iron With Iron  

Pair your more seasoned salespeople with newer members of your team for mentoring. The newly minted mentors will be both honored and motivated by their recognition as experts, and they will be reinvigorated by the new challenge of mentoring an “up and comer.” 

5. Implement Learning On Demand 

The best time to learn new information is when it solves a pressing, immediate problem. Implement a “learning on demand” system so that when your people have a challenge, they can tap into this bottomless well of knowledge to solve it. This could be an interactive knowledge base, pre-recorded webinars, or a subscription to a learning site. Constantly learning new things is key to staving off boredom, and people tend to learn best in small chunks, like the type they’d get from a learning on demand system. 

Endless Motivation In Not a Myth   

Every job has its ups and down, but the idea that a team can’t be relentlessly, consistently engaged is a myth. Your field reps can and should experience energy and engagement on a daily basis, and it’s up to you to put procedures in place to make sure they do.   

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