"Motivation vs Activation"

Great Motivation is a word that has been used to describe a team’s interaction with myself in the thousands of sales meetings and workshops I have conducted over many many years.

However, without the follow up of embedding activation strategies, then motivation itself has little long term effect and a limited life span, unless continually inspiring and motivating by external influence.

Motivation and activation techniques are a part of the Intellectual property that an individual such as myself posses, and something that I have a passion to talk about endlessly, but for the purpose of this post I am keeping it generic.

I prefer to be recognised as someone who activates people as opposed to motivate. Very rarely would I jump on top of the desk and have rara meetings.  I prefer to identify what triggers a person to become self motivated, or what motivates and drives them periodically, rather than be the ongoing external influence required for a short term result.

Empowering someone through motivation and activation techniques, is the value I prefer to bring to an organisation, not be the expert in granular knowledge of the products or services.  

If a team or individual needs to be continually motivated on a daily basis to have the drive to be proficient in delivering a sales result, then this is a tiring and ongoing process, which means that autonomy of the sales professional will need to be watched carefully , as they are requiring an external influence to create momentum or motivation and can easily fall off the mojo wagon.

Motivation is like a hot bath, you feel great while you are in it, and you don’t want to get out into the cold. Then once out,  after 15 minutes, the good feeling wears off, and you are back to what you were feeling before the bath. This is a simplistic explanation of course; however this is the foundation of sales operations that have ‘lock and load’ meetings prior to starting their prospecting, or going out on appointments. It is the foundation of good ongoing sales practice to have daily and weekly sales meetings; however meetings need to have purpose! Not to re-establish personal power, authority or hierarchy for self egotistical reasons.

Meeting’s need to be productive, need to cover 1 or 2 specific points, and the outcome needs to leave the team or individual with tools to implement or tools that stimulate their independent drive to conduct the necessary tasks, which may include self development programs, education or self- leadership development style approaches, where the team can collaborate and be involved in the processes been put forth to be implemented.

Reflection in the sales environment is extremely important, as it encourages the professional to question their own actions and identify alternative outcomes based on whether a different approach, technique or increased knowledge would have resulted in a better outcome.

The level of emotional intelligence the team members posses, will influence the ability for activation techniques to be embedded.