Strategies to Boost Morale in Sales and Marketing

How incentives, structures and frameworks deliver enhanced engagement.

A Surprising Requirement

I was invited to a forum exploring how to encourage people to send follow ups. I was surprised this was an issue, because second emails are the most successful in my clients’ outreach cycles.

The increased success rate is a natural incentive for business development representatives (BDRs) to try again.

Many firms automate outreach. I recommend doing this once it’s tested and working. BDRs then focus on improving the quality of the prospects.

In manual outreach, it seems a lot of companies still struggle to motivate staff to send second and subsequent messages. My checklist to address this is:

1. Incentives
2. Structures
3. Frameworks.

Incentives

I begin almost every investigation into bottlenecks and failing sales processes with incentives. What are people paid to do, how and when? You may experiment with these variables to improve outcomes.

If you front-load or back-load incentives then you will get different performance. The sales process is a series of small steps leading to a big transformation. Your incentive structure should reflect the length and key points of the sales cycle.

BDRs are paid to generate leads. Payment should be regular and made regardless of where the lead is in the cycle.

Paying people only when the client pays cash makes BDRs beholden to the performance of others. While I’ve seen this called either teamwork or cash management, to the BDR it is a loss of agency and hence motivation.

Leads that result in deals can generate top-up payments for BDRs once delivered. This maintains the focus on generating high quality leads.

When a firm incentivises lead generation and it is not working, it’s time to look at the outreach process.

Structures

Owners and leaders should design and test the sales process, including the outreach strategy. You must not beat people up for not delivering, when you don't know what works yourself.

Setting up automated email cycles is a good way to test outreach. This places the emphasis on the quality of targeting and messaging of prospects.

Automation allows for a wide variety of testing. For example, you may vary time of day, length of message and sending address.

The important point is that sales and marketing teams scale what is already there. They don't figure out product market fit. This is especially true of junior roles, which BDRs tend to be.

Frameworks

I am working with a representative with low morale. He struggles to generate responses and feels like giving up. This week I reviewed his outreach and he’s not following our framework.

This is simple:

1. Pain point with data
2. Position as the solution
3. Social validation with data
4. Call to action

The email must be about the prospect and the industry in which they operate. Emails that talk about your company, or offer reasons for messaging, are prone to fail.

It is remarkable how often BDRs fall back into bad habits. One of my sayings is that you haven’t told anyone anything until you’ve told them ten times. This applies to cold outreach.

I don’t like asking for meetings as a first call to action, because it’s a big step to book a call with someone you don’t know. Provide a lead magnet instead and ask for feedback.

Alternatively, and if you are worried that attachments will divert your messages to spam, highlight the pain, position and outcome of a case study and offer to send the details.

When people do not respond, follow up with a similar message with different data and call to action. Maintain a library of data for hooks, the different ways you create value and alternative calls to action. Then test which combinations work best.

This approach works on LinkedIn as well as email. In my experience different parts of the world exhibit a preference for one or other medium.

Questions to Ask and Answer

1. What is the success rate of each stage of the outreach cycle?
2. How often and how many times do we follow up outreach?
3. Are messages conforming to our proven framework?

Three ways that I can help:

1. The Profit Elevator for weekly techniques to scale any business.
2. My free email course Resolving Team Conflicts about managing and motivating people.
3. The Profit Through Process Planner, which is a comprehensive guide for anyone with a great business idea who wants to turn it into a business or reinvigorate an existing company.