Sales pressure at year-end? How to motivate sales teams to hit revenue targets

With the final quarter of 2022 now upon us, how close is your business to hitting its revenue targets? 

Q4 can be ‘make or break’ when it comes to sales reps meeting their quotas, but with a global recession looming, companies are approaching new investments with greater caution. Getting deals over the line before year-end just became all the more challenging.

But it is still possible. There are opportunities for businesses to increase revenue during an economic downturn, but a big prerequisite to this is ensuring your salespeople feel looked after and driven to succeed. 

Employees have already experienced much uncertainty and change in recent years. Now, amidst fears of large-scale layoffs and recruitment freezes, they are looking to your business leaders for security and direction. 

In times like these, strengthening your company culture matters. In addition to drawing up new revenue and mitigation strategies, it’s important to ensure your sales reps feel motivated. Three ways to achieve this include:

1. Boost morale with competitions, incentives, and opportunities to grow as a team

Almost a quarter of salespeople were diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder or depression in 2021, three times the national average. Nearly 90% of sellers report feeling burned out from work. Now, on the brink of recession, the pressure to contribute towards a healthy pipeline and convert deals quickly is mounting. 

This isn’t just an HR concern, it’s a RevOps concern. Retaining experience and talent in your sales team will avoid additional disruption to your team. It can also reduce the time and cost associated with recruitment and onboarding. 

Building in time for competitions, offering incentives, and ensuring opportunities to socialise as a team – even finding ways to incorporate these into sales activities – will inject fun into the sales workflow while offering reassurance to sales reps that they are valued.

2. Don’t overlook sales training and coaching

Revenue fears can trigger a hire and fire reaction amongst management that we all know can harm team morale. Sales managers should instead turn efforts to strengthening their approach to training and coaching. There is so much sales data available to managers today that personalised training programmes can be established with relative ease. 

Solutions are available that can synthesise this data from across the different platforms used by sales reps to uncover what it is that makes your top performers so successful. It’s also possible to objectively pinpoint areas of improvement for sales reps that aren’t performing as well. With this information, managers can coach individual reps on the exact areas they need help with. This is a more cost-effective way of training staff, it’s morale-boosting, and it’s revenue-generating: helping every one of your sales team to hit their targets.

3. Equip your sales reps with the tools to succeed

Armed with this insight, sales leaders can also share best practices throughout the sales team. Playbooks can be greatly improved upon and made to be more effective, based on accurate data and real-life buying journeys. Indeed, with the right software, businesses can even build playbooks into their CRM and activate ‘guided selling’. With Cloudapps, for example, sales teams can receive notifications of recommended next steps towards closing each of their deals, based on accurate AI analysis of the data within their CRM and other business tools.

Gamification techniques can also be applied to ensure CRM data is kept up to date in the first place. Elements of play, like leaderboards and scoreboards, help with boosting morale. Guided selling helps reps to close more deals. And a greater depth of insight from the RevOps function, as a result of up-to-date and synthesised CRM records, can provide revenue leaders with better insight into the business, which can help inform decisions and strategies during this turbulent time.

Cloudapps’ revenue intelligence platform is the only solution to combine gamification techniques, behavioural science, and the latest AI algorithms to give everyone in your business the full sales data picture they need. To find out how Cloudapps could help your business increase revenue and strengthen company culture while doing so, contact us.