As you begin thinking through your 2022 game plan and strategy as a BDR or SDR leader, also be thinking about how to motivate and engage your team over the months to come. The first half of the year is especially important as you'll be drumming up opportunities that will make up your pipeline going into the second half of the year.
The coronavirus pandemic is still a hot topic, teams are (mostly) still remote, and keeping reps on your team motivated enough to not look at new opportunities is harder than ever given the red hot job market. Team culture and motivation can solves all of these problems in whole or in part. Below we cover several ways teams using Salesloft and Outreach (specifically) can utilize various aspects of the Slack app SalesCompete (aka "CompeteBot") in 2022 to motivate their team, engage their team, and bring back some of that 2019-era in-office camaraderie.
Note: The tactics below are all demonstrated using the SalesCompete app for Slack. Feel free to install and follow along if you have Salesloft or Outreach (plus Slack). If you don't have either of these systems, then try applying the tactics below to your own sales tech stack!
- Celebrate Success Often
Celebrating success can mean a few things – calls that you deem a "success" (such as a meeting booked or referral given, etc.) Whatever you define as success, celebrate it. Celebrate it often. Applaud whomever on your team is currently doing the winning. If you've never heard of virtuous cycles, they are a thing of beauty in sales. In a nutshell, a virtuous circle is one where a good event feeds on itself to improve business further. Create virtuous cycles by celebrating your team often and in real-time right when the success occurs.
2. Highlight the Hustlers with Weighted Activity Leaderboards
As a sales leader, you are probably very well aware of the trailing metrics that define success each and everyday. But are you aware of the leading metrics that will define who on your team is about to be successful tomorrow, the next day, or next week? By setting up a custom activity leaderboard – one where you assign points to various kinds of activities (such as 5 pts for a meeting booked, 0.1 points for every call and email placed/sent, 3 pts for every conversation, you get the idea...) – you can easily highlight the top hustlers on your team. These are the reps who are breaking their backs, and for that they should be rewarded, if not by spiffs and incentives, then at least by leaderboards and medals!
3. Promote Data Visibility with Daily Progress Reports
Transparency builds trust and enhances communication. Sharing the reports that matter with your team on a daily basis each morning (or to end each day) is a great way to get everyone on the same page without singling anyone out. However you choose to do this, and whatever metrics you choose to highlight, just make sure it's somewhere super easy and accessible for your reps to find it without much hassle. If you're using Slack or Teams, this is a great place to share the data. You don't have to get it perfectly right out of the gate either – start with a few numbers/charts/graphs and tweak the report as you go. You'll soon zero in on the metrics and charts that are most meaningful for your team.
4. Dial up the Competition with Team Tournaments & Lottery Prizes
If you have never run a challenge or tournament for your team, 2022 is never too late to start. There are dozens of different formats and setups to run these. You can do battle royale style, where it's winner takes all. You can setup a bracketed tourney like march madness. Dial blocks and power hours are another classic. Whatever you choose to do, make sure to have some sort of prize or incentive on the backend and make sure the challenge doesn't run too long – it's easy to lose motivation and attention when a challenge runs for a month and the prize is a $20 gift card. We've found that a spin the wheel type prize where a rep can "spin the virtual wheel" for a random prize is also a fun motivator, no matter the game!
5. Mix up the Monotony with Meeting Bounties on Named Accounts
The job of a sales rep, and especially of a BDR or SDR, can be very monotonous at times. Repetitive calls, emails, and LinkedIn messages can be a grind. Mix things up this year when you see your reps at risk of burnout. Focus them on strategic named accounts and spiff them for when they book a meeting with one of them. Alternatively, offer a spiff/prize for when one of your reps books a meeting with an account that is under a specific tag in Salesloft or Outreach – something like a "Tier A" or "New Industry B" type tag for strategic accounts that align with your current greater sales strategy for the quarter/year. For BDRs and SDRs, this is a fast and easy way to show your reps that you care about their mental well-being but also that you care about their professional development.
6. Pick up Slow Afternoons with Power Hours
When it gets to about 2pm in the afternoon and you start to see rep activity wane a bit, the classic power hour is your go-to pick-me-up that works every time. Just be careful though – the point of the power hour need not always be "who can book the most meetings" – often times the point of the power hour is to just pick up the energy in the room (virtual or physical). With that in mind, consider running a power hour where the prize you've setup goes to the rep who holds the most conversations or places the most calls instead of just the rep who books the most meetings. This gives more of your reps a chance to win and increases their motivation to participate in a serious way from the beginning.
Overall, whether meetings are booked or not it's still probably a win because you'll notice that the activity of your team is going to increase over the course of the rest of the day. In the future, if you really do want to incentivize your reps with a meetings booked power hour, you can set these up on alternating days. Try to keep power hours to no more than one per day, even 3 per week – running them too often drains the appeal and makes the reps a bit apathetic to the idea of the power hour in the first place!
7. Promote Faster Learning by Coaching Call Rejections
You've heard the old saying that failing is still succeeding. That is most definitely true when it comes to sales development. Call coaching is a cornerstone of any good sales development leader's strategy for their reps. By helping reps through their failures, you're much more likely to prevent them from making the same mistake again. Whether it's their hook, pitch, or closing – you can help your reps in real time using a tool like SalesCompete to post calls to a Slack channel of your choice when they match the sentiment "Not Interested" (for example). This provides a seamless and real-time way for you to offer feedback as a manager to your reps. Try to review at least 1 call per rep per day – they'll thank you for it, trust me. Not only will they appreciate the advice, they'll probably also feel like you're not MIA if your team is remote and you don't converse each and everyday.
8. Fight Fatigue with Recurring Conversation Goals
Last but not least we have another suggestion for inside sales teams in 2022 on how to beat fatigue/burn-out. Start by working backwards from your internal goals and priorities. Get micro. Setup goals on the weekly or even daily level for your team so they can keep motivated in the day-to-day grind of things. Have reps not hitting meeting goals? Setup a conversations goals instead. Make their goal having 10 conversations a day or 50 conversations a week. The psychology of this is that they feel much more in control of this goal, and that it's more attainable for them, because the pressure to book the meeting is not there. After they hit this conversations goal, you already know the next step is to focus on the booking of meetings. You already know the effort is there from the rep hitting your conversations goal, so go ahead and implement that skills-based goal for meetings now!
And... that's a wrap. I sincerely hope these 8 tactics can help you in your 2022 quest for sales domination in your respective industries. I would also love to hear what you're doing that hasn't been discussed above (to motivate and engage your team). Feel free to drop me a line at kyle(at)salescompete.com!
💪 With sales love,
~ Kyle
