Online Tutoring on Motivating Your Sales Staff

Motivating Your Sales Staff

1.    Introduction

The purpose of this report is to combine the practices and theories of organizational behavior for the critical analysis of the problem situations that would be faced in the chosen scenario. The Group Exercise 2 – Motivating Your Sales Staff is selected for this report. Moreover, the critical thinking and problem-solving abilities are first identified and then analyzed for motivating sales staff and developing alternative organizational behavior approaches for the challenges of motivating sales staff in the workplace. Thus, this report also addresses that why are there different approaches required for motivating different people keeping the perspective of organizational behavior approaches and theories.

The workplace motivation is referred to as something that energizes the employees of an organisation so that they can put their efforts and perform the best out of it. So, whenever the employees are motivated, they achieve their high success levels and give the value to the company via their performance (Kotni and Karumuri, 2018). So, it is important to inspire and motivate employees if the business wants to increase the employee productivity and consequently increase the customer engagement. The sales staff is the staff of any business that has the responsibility for the sales (Kelly, Presslee and Webb, 2017). The sales staff possess marketing skills and these skills can be either marketing a product or any service to a general customer or market to the top management of the wealthy and famous company. The employees must be motivated for showing their potential and therefore, several ways are needed to be followed for empowering and enabling the employees to do so as stated by the organizational theory (Arora, Singha and Sahney, 2017). This depicts how important it is to motivate employees, similarly, the sales staff need to be motivated more because they are the profit generators of a company as they are the ones that will attract the potential customers of your company.

There are some of the behaviors that are expected from the sales staff and therefore, for that purpose, the company has to set some subsequent goals for their sales staff. If the employees are following those goals and providing the desired behavior, then such type of behavior must be awarded so that it will continue. The organisation needs to set up a system in order to reward the behavior of employees that was up to the mark as set by the goals of the organisation. On the other hand, if the sales staff is not performing a behavior that was expected from them according to the set goals then such issues require tackling them proactively. So, the organizations must foresee the challenges of motivating their employees and design proactive strategies for efficiently and effectively handling such instances. Therefore, this report addresses all these points that are required for the motivation of the sales staff by any business, company or an organisation especially for our retail clothing store named as Threads that has the business strategy of providing high quality products and high quality customer service.

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2.    Main body

This part of the report addresses the main questions that are presented in the chosen exercise of “Motivating Your Sales Staff”.

2.1.       The behavior you want from your sales staff

As the field of organizational behavior focuses on investigating the impact that the structure, groups or individuals have on the behavior in an organisation with the purpose to apply the knowledge for improving the effectiveness of an organisation. So, the behavior of the sales staff also has an impact on the organisation (Wood et al., 2016). Being the management team of the retail clothing store named as “Threads”, a certain behavior is wanted and expected from our sales staff. The details of the behavior that we want as a management team from our sales team are as follows:

• Target oriented: As a management team of a retail clothing store, we expect our sales staff to be target oriented as our sales of the products will be targeted to some limit where we can get enough profit and where we can also reward our employees for their target-oriented behavior. If we do not train our sales staff to be target-oriented, then they will never know how much work they have to do or how many sales they have to carry. Thus, the target-oriented sales staff will then help our brand to achieve its targeted sales which could not have been possible otherwise without our target-oriented sales staff. In this way, our sales staff will accomplish a specific sales target that is expected from them by the top management and middle management.
• Courteous behavior: The courteous behavior of sales staff refers to being respectful, polite and considerate in the manners. So, having a courteous behavior of sales staff of any company means that they have the power to attract and win hearts of as many customers as they want. Thus, we also want courteous behavior from our sales staff because, in this way, we can achieve our organizational goals of more sales and more customer attraction. Moreover, the provision of high-quality customer service is our business strategy which could be only achieved via courteous and polite behavior of our sales staff.
• Improving customer satisfaction via proactive behavior: It is highly perceived in most businesses that if their customers are satisfied with the products and services then they can become the most successful businesses in the market. We also want our sales team to behave in a proactive way that they provide complete customer satisfaction and will always try to improve the customer satisfaction via their services and dealing. For instance, if any customer wants to see more designs from any collection but he or she is unable to find them, our sales staff will proactively and courteously guide them whatever product they need and persuade them to even buy more products from our stores. This will increase our customer satisfaction and also helps our sales staff to achieve their targets. Consequently, this will help our business to increase the profit margins. Additionally, if any of our customers is not feeling well and need something like water or any such service, we want our sales staff to analyze the situation as soon as they observe it and always stay vigilant and help and support our customers in such situations in the best possible way.
• Sociable and friendly behavior: We as a management team want our sales staff to create a store environment in which our customers feel like they are comfortable via their sociable and friendly behavior. We also want that our customers remember and always feel that they cannot get such a comfortable environment in any other store. The main purpose of a sales staff is to increase the sales and convince the customer to buy the products and if the sales staff is introvert and quiet then they are not capable to sale the products. Whereas, if the sales staff is sociable and interact with customers in a friendly manner then they can attract more customers to buy their products and the customers also feel that they are guided enough by the staff and the staff is also friendly, so they feel comfortable in such store. Similarly, we also want our sales staff to behave in a sociable and friendly manner.

2.2.       Goals you would set for your sales staff

It is very important to set goals for the sales staff so that they can accomplish those goals effectively and efficiently. According to the Human Resources Approach of organizational behavior, the people in an organisation are their central resources (Bande et al., 2016). For our retail clothing store, our sales staff is the central resource that should be trained and developed to achieve a high level of commitment and competency. The Human Resources Approach also refers to the supportive role of the management team to achieve high performance instead of the controlling role of managers. Therefore, the goal setting is very significant in this respect as everyone will be aware of the organizational vision and achieve success.

Some of the goals that we would for our sales staff are as follows:

• Set the sales target: We will first set the sales target because we are dealing with retail clothing store and this requires our products to be sold in order to get the profit. If we do not set any particular sales target then our sales staff will also not be motivated to work and they will never know that how many products they are supposed to sale and what comes under their sales duty. Therefore, it is important to set the sales target so that our target-oriented sales team can match their individual goals of achieving certain targets and get rewards with the organizational goals as well for achieving certain profit level. For that purpose, we will set weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly sales targets and this will also set clear objectives for our sales staff.
• Persuade potential customers: One of the main goals that we would set for our sales staff is to persuade a certain number of potential customers via their courteous behavior to buy products or and utilize our services. Persuading potential customers is something that is also related to sales target as the customers that will only be persuaded would buy the clothes. But sales targets are set weekly, monthly, quarterly and on yearly basis, whereas persuading customers will be set as a daily goal and this is for the purpose of motivating the sales staff to work as much hard as they can and achieve the desired incentives. In this way, each day it will be calculated that how much customers a salesperson persuaded and sold products and then the high performers will be rewarded daily with a certain amount.
• Increase customer retention: The other significant goal that we will set for our sales staff is to increase the customer retention and customer engagement of our retail clothing store. This will be achieved via the proactive behavior of our sales staff to support and assist our customers. This will resultantly achieve customer satisfaction and it would further lead towards customer retention. This goal is set in order to achieve high customer retention and this will benefit our business to achieve success. As the individual goals are matched with the organizational goals in organizational behavior, similarly we will align sales staff goals with our organizational goals and strategies of providing best customer services with high-quality products.
• Make customers feel comfortable: As one of the main business strategies of our retail clothing store is to provide high-quality customer service, so we will set the goals of making our customers feel comfortable via our sales staff having sociable and friendly behavior.

It is important that all the goals that will be set must be properly communicated to each and every team member. If we as a management team are expecting certain behavior and want our sales team to behave in that way then we must ensure that the goals are shared with the team members in order to be clear about setting goals and expected behavior of sales staff in return.

2.3.       Type of system you would set up to reward these behaviors

We will set up a system for rewarding the expected behaviors of our sales staff in a way that it will satisfy all of our sales staff as they are the ones that have to face pressure and have to manage it in various situations in the store. It is very difficult to satisfy all the employees because the source of motivation or motivators are different for different people (Wiradendi Wolor, 2019). For instance, incentives can be considered as rewards for some employees and they will feel that they are rewarded for their behavior, whereas incentives can not be considered as a reward for another employee who is earning enough for his or her livelihood and may wish to get something else that is lacking in life like appreciation. Furthermore, there will also be high performers, middle range performers and slackers and we would need to set up broad strategies to hit productivity for all type of our sales staff. There is also intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for people according to organizational behavior. So, our reward system would be designed in a holistic way keeping in view that different people are motivated by different things. The tentative system that we would set up to reward these behaviors are as follows:

• Commission, monetary bonus and incentives

The monetary bonus, commissions and incentives for sales staff will be given as some of the employees will be motivated by money and they actually might need it.

• Regular meetings

For some employees, motivation only stays for some days and then eventually goes off. So, holding regular meetings and one on one check in to boost the morale is necessary. This will not only benefit the employees that need a regular reminder but also for all the staff as it will be beneficial to motivate.

• Offsite and recreational events

In current times, most of the employees prefer to get offsite and recreational events as a source of motivation, so we will also incorporate this into our system so that our staff feel that they are being valued by their organisation.

• Pleasant workplace

We will provide our employees with a pleasant and motivational work environment so that they do not lose hope and motivation, rather continue to prosper in a pleasant workplace.

• Self development opportunities

We will also provide ways to learn new skills for our staff as their self development opportunities via various trainings and career building opportunities so that they keep on motivating themselves that we are prospering by working in this retail clothing store.

• Public appreciation displays

Appreciation is very important in organizational behavior to be it for an employee, a salesperson, management team or managers. Appreciation is considered as a motivation for some of the employees. Therefore, we would also incorporate appreciation awards and events for our sales staff to achieve their sales targets and even go beyond the targets.