Today, we have an ever-increasing number of knowledge workers. As work becomes less about muscle and more about innovation, intellect, and sales leadership styles often need to change becoming progressively more flexible.

Knowledge workers generally have loyalty to their manager and sales team, but not to the company. Managing employees through fear usually results in them voting with their feet, and leaving for a more rewarding work environment.

Now, with baby boomers increasingly retiring from the sales workforce there is a rapidly growing shortage of qualified workers. So how do you recruit more members for your sales team? And, how do you turn each into high-producing sales leaders.

Finding the Love

Managers often find by showing some “love”, it helps to recruit and retain high product sales team members. Do you have that employee who complains loudly? Which type of employees is more productive for your sales organization?  There are many reasons why people love their jobs:

• Some people love sales for the money
• Others love sales for the recognition
• Some love the security it provides for their family and themselves
• Some love their work because it allows them to contribute in making a difference.

Once you know what motivates an individual worker, you can provide that environment which motivates them to become a high producing sales leader. And, when people love their work, they’ll tell others. This means more people will want to work for your sales organization. The trick is to create a work environment where this form of enthusiasm is at least allowed and at best, encouraged.

Reputation Attracts Sales Talent

In today’s interconnected mobile world, it is important to build a reputation that attracts more qualified sales leaders to your sales team? Support your workers showing appreciation so they feel like whole people doing a job, not being the job. Appreciation fosters awareness, fear falls away, job enjoyment, satisfaction and sales results increase.

Identifying Motivation Profiles

It is important to develop a sales force that is self motivated focused on certain key skill sets to get them to their next level of growth and performance?  While leading sales organizations often manage thousands of salespeople, we generally find four types of individual motivating factors or characteristics including;

The high achieving sales executives are the best at bringing in the numbers, but chances are that you may spend a fair share of your time cleaning up their messes. It may often seem like they’re either sky-high or down in the dumps. When the high achiever is down, they are out of their selling zone, and productivity comes to a standstill. But when they are up on their game, look out world.

The professional producer may also be considered very consistent, a total team player, even tempered, patient, and consistently delivers results. Professionals are also part of the elite members on the sales team, but they seem to be missing some opportunities that would catapult them to super stardom. Instead, they generally stick to self-proven conservative approaches.

The caretaker maybe stuck in stagnate sales game. These are the sales executives that are simply stuck in their lackluster comfort zones—giving you a solid month about every third month, or giving you that seventy percent effort range. They have the potential, but they’re consistently mediocre. You just can’t get them to perform the difficult tasks that it takes to produce at top levels with any regularity. Worse yet, they’re passive aggressive. You say to yourself, “If I could only wake them up, they’d be right up there with the best.”

The searcher is the most difficult and not a sales career fit.  These misfits are consumed with fear, and if truth be told, they honestly hate sales. A searcher has no real intention of making the necessary changes to be successful. You’re better off helping them find more fulfilling careers elsewhere.

Strong Sales Leadership Helps People “Out” Too

Effective leadership management must often perform the unenviable task of helping those that don’t belong to find other career paths. If you want sales to improve, particularly in highly competitive sales industries, then leaders must create a career growth-oriented atmosphere that thrives on constant improvement, regardless of market conditions. By the way, that means leadership management must also be striving to break through to their personal achievement levels as well. Effective sales is about sustaining momentum thru innovation creating even more revenue opportunities on a consistent basis.