[Employee Motivation] Fired Up!

It’s tough enough to come up with the right management strategy for the ants that are invading your customer’s home or office. But when you’re managing pest control salespeople, figuring out the right management strategy can be even tougher. This is especially true when it comes to motivation.
Motivating salespeople is a mystery to most owners and managers. Even the man who invented management consulting, the late Peter Drucker, struggled with it. “We know nothing about motivation,” he wrote, “all we can do is write books about it.”

A pest control salesperson who has just lost a big account may appear to lack motivation. Consider not labeling or not trying to deal with a salesperson’s emotions or motivational issues. Instead, deal with the salesperson’s behavior.

MOTIVATION IS A ‘BREEZE.’ Once, a participant in my management training seminar asked me how she could motivate an employee who was being paid minimum wage to do low-skilled labor. I asked the manager to describe the behavior she was getting from the employee and the behavior she wanted.

“She doesn’t hustle,” said the manager. “I need her to hustle.”

“Hustle can mean different things to different people,” I said. “Your employee might think she is hustling. So, if she were hustling to your satisfaction, what would that look like? Because if you can’t describe your motivation problem in behavioral terms, you don’t have a motivation problem. You are just complaining about your employee.”

After a few minutes of pondering this, the manager said, “I would just like her to make a slight breeze as she passes by other customers and co-workers in the building. That’s all I want.”

When the manager got back to the office, she put a paper towel on a table and asked each employee to move fast enough to make the towel flutter when they walked by it. “We need to move fast enough to make a breeze,” she told her team. When an employee wasn’t moving fast enough to make a slight breeze, the manager described that lack of a breeze instead of accusing people of being lazy, slothful slugs. Specificity is your friend.

WHAT ELSE THIS MEANS. Once you are clear about how you want your salespeople to behave, you quit worrying about trying to motivate them.
Selling pest control services requires specific behaviors. It is much easier to manage the gap between the behavior you observe and the behavior you want. For example, if you want the salesperson to suggest an additional service to 10 existing customers, you can identify those customers and coach the salesperson on when and how he or she will do that additional selling. That’s specificity. You can follow up at the end of the day or week to assess results and make course corrections.

Frederick Herzberg wrote “Work and the Nature Man” and developed the Motivation-Hygiene theory. “Employees are motivated by their own inherent need to succeed at a challenging task,” he said. “The manager’s job, then, is not to motivate people to get them to achieve; instead, the manager should provide opportunities for people to achieve so that they will become motivated.”

Closing a sale is the achievement that motivates salespeople. That’s everything you need to know about motivation.

That knowledge should cause you to devote your sales management time to closing the gap between the behaviors your salespeople are exhibiting and the behavior you want them to exhibit. If you need 10 prospecting calls a day and are getting only seven, you need to close that gap. If you want three corporate account presentations per week and are getting two, you can focus on that gap.

When the new increased activity results in closing more sales, you will have a motivated salesperson.

THE PRODUCTIVITY LOOP. Ultimately, long-term pest control sales success is more than closing. Long-term success comes from helping your customers get the outcomes they want. If you solve the customer’s pest control problem, your salespeople will feel even better about closing the next customer.

The “productivity loop” describes how motivation grows and takes hold in salespeople. Closing the sale is motivating because achievement is motivating. The extra commission recognizes that achievement again. And the customer whose pest control problem you have solved continues to use your prevention services and refers you to other potential customers. This makes a salesperson want to close more sales, help more customers and earn more commission checks.

Lack of motivation is always caused by a deeper problem — lack of success.
Losing a big corporate customer, therefore, can create feelings of failure and decrease motivation. When this happens, one of the fastest ways to get salespeople back on track is to have them focus on all the times they have won and not the one deal they have just lost. Salespeople who keep a “victory log” report that recalls their wins helps them get back into the state of mind they had when they were winning and, therefore, motivated.

The trick is to create the victory logs before you need them. In a sales meeting, ask your salespeople write down 25 victories they have had in sales, sports, school, extracurricular activities and life in general. Give them 15 or 20 minutes to create this initial list. Then, let them share a victory with you and their fellow salespeople. Recalling past wins and how they felt when they won can bring those successful feelings flooding back. This exercise will be more motivating than anything you can say to them. Try it. And should something bad happen, they can put it in perspective by re-reading their victory logs.  

The author is a Certified Speaking Professional and the author of “The Accidental Salesperson.” Find him online at www.apexperformancesystems.com. Contact him via e-mail at clytle@giemedia.com.