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Have you given unique names to your sales teams? If not, you should certainly consider doing so. You may be thinking ‘what’s the importance of sales team names?’. In addition to making your teams easier to categorise and organise, team names allow you to inject a bit of personality into your business.
If you don’t already use them, you may be wondering what the point is of using sales team names. Putting on your creative hat and giving your teams creative names can galvanise them and in turn increase their levels of motivation.
So how exactly does using creative names for your sales teams increase performance? Well, team names are a great way of promoting bonding and teamwork. They can encourage team members to work more closely together by giving them a clear identity and common ground.
Often workers can feel a sense of ‘patriotism’ for their team. Everyone likes being part of a group. By giving your team’s unique, personalised identities, you can create an almost family-like atmosphere amongst team members.
Why not encourage your sales teams to name themselves? Their names should be bespoke to create a larger feel of personality.
Don’t settle for generic names, make them reflect the personality and skills of the salespeople! Here’s some ideas for aspects to base your team names on.
Try deciding on team names based on department or sector if possible. This has the added benefit of giving your teams a strong basis for identity. All male Business Development team? How about something like ‘The BD Boys’?
If some of your sales people share a common interest or hobby, why not try naming them around this? For example, if a sales team are all football fans, try playing around with ‘goals’.
Every office needs a bit of humour. In a dynamic, fast-moving, goal-orientated sales environment a bit of humour can help improve your team’s mood.
Definitely consider using witty names and nicknames to inject a bit of laughter into your office. They don’t even have to be sales related if you don’t want. Just as long as they give your team’s a distinct sense of personalised identity. Of course, make sure the names are appropriate for your workplace! Try not to offend anybody.
Consider the industry you work in. Tying industry related terms into your team names is a great way of personalising your sales teams. Work in the engineering industry? Team names like ‘Profit Engineers’ can work.
So apart from sales team names, how can you inject more personality and motivation into your workers? Little efforts can make big differences when it comes to a sense of belonging and teamwork. Here’s a few ideas for how you can bring your team members closer together.
Salespeople should wear their team’s colours with pride! Why not make t-shirts for each team so that they can show off their loyalty. You could go all out and get shirts in team colours printed or customised. Or you could simply get a few white t-shirts and let your teams have at them with markers. Whatever works best for your office, have fun with it!
Have you got a creative in your office? Try getting them to create team logos. Or better yet, get each team to make their own logo! This gives your teams a more sports-like feel and offers visual personality. It’s an opportunity for your salespeople to put down their headsets and pick up their pencils.
Can nobody in your teams draw? Even better! Getting your salespeople to put a little bit of themselves into their team provides a lot of fun personality in your business. You could merge this idea with the implementation of t-shirts. Encourage your teams to wear t-shirts with their team colours and logo printed on.
The design of a logo is something that takes very little time to do. But the effect on morale and the boost in positive atmosphere it gives your office could lead to significant performance increases.
Encouraging friendly competition can motivate your workers to outdo each other and improve their engagement levels in general. This is where team names, colours, logos, and shirts can help.
Try implementing a form of scoreboard on the office wall. Be creative with it! Plain old numbers are dull, have some visual representation of how each team is doing. Put emphasis on the ‘friendly’ part though! The last thing you want is to cause a divide in your business when things get too heated in competition.
Encourage teams to support each other both in and outside of work. For example, you might want to have a company sports day or games night. That will allow your teams to bond outside of work and best each other at fun activities.
So now that we’ve got team names covered, what other methods are there of motivating your sales teams? There’s quite a few ways to go about this.
Everyone loves a good day out. Taking a fun trip with your work mates can be a great way to unwind and escape the office for a bit. Incentivise hitting targets by offering days out as a reward.
You can offer this either to the whole business, to those who meet their targets, or even just to the team who performs the best. It’s up to you.
Offering incentives to only the best team encourages healthy competition, but also runs the risk of demotivating those who don’t make the grade. On the other hand, extending this reward to everyone when only some teams meet their targets may not be motivating enough. A bit of friendly competition between teams can be great if handled well. Don’t let things get out of hand!
A bit of nice food never goes amiss! In addition to days out, smaller incentives can include team meals out or special lunches. Treating your trailblazing teams to a meal out at a nice restraint, or even bringing in a nice lunch can be enough to give them that little extra push. This often works for short term motivation like weekly/monthly targets, whereas larger incentives can be saved for big targets (6 monthly, yearly).
Not all rewards have to cost the business money. Little perks may seem insignificant but they can help provide that extra little bit of motivation.
Things like allowing a casual attire day if you work in a business-dress environment can provide a little incentive. What about allowing high achievers to leave a bit earlier on Fridays? That will surely get some of your salespeople’s blood pumping! Have an office radio? Why not give top achievers their choice of music for a day? If their music choices are poor, other teams will definitely want to out-perform them if only to get a break from their playlists!
Positive reinforcement is great for motivation. But what about negative reinforcement? Light-hearted forfeits can give everyone a little boost. Just makes sure that the forfeit is fair and that everyone agrees to it! Never force anyone to do something they didn’t agree to, even if it’s only minor. Forfeits should be minor enough that there should be no complaints when it’s time to carry them out. Under no circumstances should anyone feel bullied into doing a forfeit.
Leading by example is best when it comes to forfeits. Motivate your teams by putting yourself or other senior management members at stake. You could pledge to wear fancy dress in the office if teams meet their targets. Or take them out for drinks and sing a bit of karaoke for them.
Putting the forfeit on management also has the added benefit of helping to bridge the gap between them and their salespeople.
These rewards are only idea though! The best way of motivating your sales teams is to let them choose their own reward. It’s all good offering a broad incentive, but is it something they actually want?
Before deciding on rewards, ask your salespeople individually what reward would motivate them best. For group incentives like trips and days out, take a vote! By doing this you’re also helping your team members feel valued. People are happier and work better when they feel like their input matters.
Whether you use funny team name, custom t-shirts, reward meals or days out; you’re helping improve motivation. This goes a long way to improving sales team performance levels. With just a little bit of creativity and good fun, you could well see your team’s motivation and performance increase.
So what other motivational techniques can you use? In one of our previous insights we discussed how to improve workplace engagement in your organisation. By promoting a healthy culture you improve employee engagement and productivity.
We’ve also previously discussed the details of sales team structure and how to recruit a profit-hungry team in 2018. This article covers different types of sales structures and how they benefit you. We talk about what type of motivated people you need to fill your team with, and what essential qualities you should be looking for to form a highly-driven team.
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