Do you want your sales team to reach their maximum potential? Of course you do. Unfortunately, we as sales managers often make simple mistakes that cripple the motivation and productivity of our sales force. Here are some of the most common you should guard against.

We are already battling a tough sales environment. Customers are hesitant and fearful. This is lowering the motivation and confidence of your sales group. The last thing you want to do is to add to this negativity and impact sales production. This is why you need to take a careful review of your sales management and make sure you are not making these common mistakes.

1. Avoiding the Truth for the “Corporate Line”: You sales team is smart. They read the news and watch the numbers in your organization. They know if things are good or bad. They hate surprises as much as you do.

So, avoid the corporate-speak and get to brass tacks when you talk to your team. Tell them the truth. Tell them where they need to be. Tell them where the organization needs to be. You will be amazed how often they take you there.

2. Over Promise, Under Deliver: Missed expectations and disappointments are killer attacks on sales performance. Set realistic goals and objectives. Connect them to reasonable incentives. Then follow-through at all costs.

If possible, surprise the team with more on account of exceptional performance or accelerated performance.

3. Pumping Up Some at The Expense of Others: This is a common error. We always preach praising in public, but never do so at the expense or embarrassment of others.

This technique is like comparing brothers on the baseball diamond or using one sisters’ performance in a competition to teach the other–these are recipes for destructive competition.

4. Discouraging Learning & Training: Training takes time and often cost money. This causes a lot of managers to discourage personal development to hit the monthly number.

Remember there are creative ways to work training and learning into every sales meeting, email, and voice mail you lead your team through. Reward and encourage those that take learning and training into their own hands.

5. Leading with Fear: Threats and punitive reinforcement simply backfires. You can’t coerce your team into performing. It will wound your sales team and your customer. Keep your shop flowing with motivation and confident encouragement.

6. Micromanaging: Running ram-shot over your sales team is unlikely to achieve strong performance. And it will certainly never yield remarkable results. Truly amazing performances and mind blowing months are always the result of creativity, innovation, and initiative.

Micromanaging your sales team kills all of these critical factors for unexpected success.

7. High Expectations & No Direction: Putting an arbitrary goal on the leader board does no good. Your sales team needs direction. They need an idea on how to get there. Give them direction that makes them confident in obtaining the prize.

8. Not Leveraging the Experienced: Chances are your sales force is not without a significant amount of experience. Even the smallest shop has that one or two seasoned veterans. Find ways to leverage this experience. Get them to assist with training, motivation, leading. Get all of those secrets to success out of their heads and out on the sales floor.

9. Wasting Time with Voice Mail & Email: An idle sales manager often feels like he or she needs to be doing something. That usually leads to a useless, pointless, lengthy email or voice mail. Save it. Resist the temptation. Your sales team is already overwhelmed with serving new customers, assuming you were listening to 1-8.

Don’t add unnecessary noise to their sales day.

10. Coaching with Negativity: Like I mentioned in point 5, negativity is the bane of any sales team. Keep it off the sales floor. Avoid leading any coaching session with a negative example. Pick an example or scenario where you can teach the same principle, but lead it with a positive result.

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The natural reaction when sales slow or you hit a closing slump is to cut back on the important things: less training, less motivation, less sales people. This approach is guaranteed to set you on shaky ground to blast your way out.

Sales motivation should be a key element for any “recovery” plan. Just like our economy–consider launching a sales “stimulus” plan in your sales organization.

Sales People are Emotional

The best sales people are emotional. They are high energy, success junkies. They want to win.

If they don’t win they will often descend quickly into a funk. When success comes they hit the ceiling. That is why sustaining motivation and confidence is so important to getting consistent sales performance.

Cutting back on those activities (i.e., sales meetings and motivational moments) is a recipe for sales failure. Or, at least long-term droughts.

Confidence is Contagious and Training Induced

Confidence is contagious. It quickly transfers to other team members and most importantly to customers. Customers are naturally timid to make decisions in tough economic times. Your confidence can help customers through this silent objection.

So, how do you put confidence into the conversation with customers? Training.

Those training sessions with your sales team that motivates them, shares best practices, and gives them in depth information about the value of their products to customers will exude confidence on the very next sales call.

Wins Increase with Wins

The real benefit to getting motivation into sales and confidence on the phone is the win. Winning is as contagious as confidence. Any high school basketball team can tell you the power of a win to get another win–the value of a winning streak to extend it.

That is why pumping up a win, even a small win in your sale organization can spark a rally in your sales numbers. Look for those small examples to get your next rally started.

Sales is the Revenue Life Blood

Remember sales is your revenue life blood. Cutting back on the elements of success in your sales organization is certain to sack your revenue. So, amp up the motivation, training, and confidence and you will be closing more deals in no time.

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There is not a sales person out there that would argue with the role of sales motivation in winning deals. Every sales meeting and rally should be packed with motivation. Motivation to set goals, break records, and bring revenue.

Is something missing? Do you feel like this isn’t working anymore? Are your sales suffering in this down economy? Chances are there were a lot of “yes” answers to these questions. Want the secret to changing that fate–transferring that motivation to your customer?

Don’t Neglect Sales Meetings

Sales meetings are the heart and soul of your sales motivation. Unfortunately, as times toughen I see a lot of organizations abandoning their sales meetings. This will lead to a dangerous degeneration of confidence and motivation.

Sales people are social by nature and need that collaboration to prime their engines. Sharing best practices, reviewing products, and cheering successes are important. Even if sales are down you need to pull together that motivational moment. You need to look for and reward every little positive.

Building Confidence in Your Sales Team

Keeping the negative out of the room is critical. There is certain to be a lot of grumbling and “can’t” floating around the sales floor. That is not going to help any deals get closed.

Confidence is a state of assurance. Most of the sales people in your organization have been consistent closers at one time or another–remind them of those successes. Take some time at your next sales meeting to reflect on what worked to build past successes. Are there ideas to be relearned?

Most importantly look for and highlight the smallest successes in hard sales environments. Look for opportunities to leverage those small successes into larger ones.

Transfer Confidence to Your Customers

Confidence is contagious. That is the most important reason to crank up the sales motivation during tough sales environments. Your motivation, your confidence can and should be transferred to your customers.

Many of the prospects you will talk to will be timid and pensive in this economic environment. You have to cut through this hesitation. You have to flush out this silent objection. To get the deal you need to transfer your confidence to the buyer.

Your motivation will give them confidence to make that decision.

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Did you ever think you could increase your sales with a little dose of appreciation? I can guarantee you appreciation sells. Simple acts of kindness and genuine interest in others builds confidence and trust in your customer.

Appreciate What You Are Doing

If you want to build an appreciation sales process it has to start with you. That’s right, you have to appreciate your own efforts. This creates passion and incentive. When you enjoy what you are doing and believe it is genuinely valuable and helpful–it will exude from you, into your sales.

Appreciate Those That Support You

Big time sales takes support. You may have an office manager, a loan processor, a virtual assistant, or just an understanding spouse. Showing appreciation to these important support folks can enhance their performance and contribute to bigger things for you.

Like your own motivation and passion–seeing results fuels the fire. Showing appreciation to those who support your sales efforts fuels their fire. Another way appreciation can increase your sales.

Appreciate the Customer

Appreciating your customer goes without saying. If you are attempting to build long-term service relationships you need to appreciate each sale. This can be shown in a lot of ways:

• Highly responsive call-backs and responses
• Offering a cell phone number or direct line
• Listening intently to the customer’s needs
• Referring customers other services they need
• An unexpected closing gift
• Following up after the sale (a few days and months)

Not only will this appreciation approach help you land the immediate sale, it is a sure-fire way to rack up referrals.

Appreciate Life and Blessings

It is amazing how blessed most of us are, even the average among us. Appreciating the simple things in life and the opportunities that we are regularly given can transfer into sales. Again this sense of appreciate creates confidence and confidence makes sales.

Improving your attitude of gratitude makes you and every one around you–including customers–better. Appreciation sells!

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Seth Godin once again challenges us to think. He leads with, “Why did you stop educating yourself when you graduated? ”

He gives us an answer too:

“Books remind us of school, of chores, of homework. Give someone a DVD of a hit movie currently in the theaters and they’ll eagerly thank you and watch it that weekend. Give them a book and it’s a whole commotion. “I read that book!” they brag to you next week, when maybe they didn’t really.”

Unlike television or movies, which are passive experiences–books engage our mind differently. They drive us to think, imagine, and derive. Reading invokes us to learn and try new things.

Here are a few of my recent favorite business books:

• Getting Things Done
• The Return of Depression Economics
• The New Rules of PR and Marketing
• The Little Red Book of Selling

Want to consume a lot more of the top business books quickly? Check out the Top 100 Business Books.

So, what was the last book you read? And, what did you learn?

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Hard work is the root of all perfection, whether you are an Olympic gold medalist or a top 10 mortgage loan officer. Samuel Goldwyn, an early Hollywood producer, said it best: “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” We all want success and luck, but are you willing to put in the effort?

Here are a few of my favorite tips for “kicking your own ass”:

1. Start every day, yesterday. Whether it is a task list, lead sheet, or voice mail. Get your day planned in the closing minutes of the previous day.

2. Work in short, 30 minute bursts. This is scientifically proved to be about the limit of most people’s attention span. Leverage that in scheduling your day.

3. Do the work. Many spend all day planning and organizing the work. Just grab a task and do it to completion. If your projects are too large, break them into smaller tasks. Remember 30 minute executions.

4. Have goals. These goals should be short and long-term goals. Short goals should help support bigger ones. Knowing where you are going is critical to getting there.

5. Give yourself a little peace. Create a specific time each day to re-center yourself and relieve any stress you are holding. Don’t neglect this. It is critical to you running at peak performance.

Stop whining and “kick you own ass.” Want to hit the golf ball like Tiger Woods? Easy, hit 500 a day. Get the picture? Start working your sales plan now!

As my fellow Austinite Lance Armstrong puts so well “People ask me all the time what I’m on. I’m on my bike 6 hours per day. What are you on?” And yes  … he will win the next Tour De Lance. We expect to have our best year ever in 2009 by helping so many of you elevate your game. Let’s roll!

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(photo credit: shygantic)