Last updated on October 18th, 2025 at 06:26 am
Sales are the lifeblood of all businesses.
Consequently, your salespeople play an essential role in your company’s success. They are the ones responsible for generating revenue!
Let’s keep it real, though. Doing sales day in and day out is tough. Constant rejection can wear you down really fast. That’s why the field of sales has such a high turnover rate. People burn out and quit.
Fortunately, there are various measures that business owners can take to counteract this depressing trend. It doesn’t have to be that way!
Want to know how to motivate your sales team to kick ass in 2026?
Continue reading…
Have a Generous Compensation Structure
Let’s talk about money first.
It’s no secret that people who go into sales tend to be ambitious, competitive, and motivated by money.
So it makes sense to have a generous compensation structure if you want to be able to not just attract but also retain talent.
Otherwise, individuals who want to pursue a career in sales might join your company simply to get their foot in the door but then they will leave the moment they can find a better opportunity elsewhere. And who can blame them?
The reality is that if you want to retain employees, you can’t rely on abstract concepts such as “loyalty”, you need to provide incentives that ensure that staying with your company is in their best interest.
A generous compensation structure can help you do that. It will also make your salespeople more motivated in general. Why?
When you underpay people or even pay them the industry average, they know that they can go and get a similar job at a similar compensation elsewhere provided that they have the required skills.
However, when you provide a compensation package that is unusually generous, they know that they can’t easily find that elsewhere, so they will appreciate the opportunity more and will be less likely to treat it as a placeholder job.
Here’s the compensation structure that we recommend:
- Base salary – You want the base salary to be higher than the industry average for that role. This applies even to entry-level positions that don’t require any previous sales experience.
- Fixed commission for each sale – Do the math to work out what percentage of the product price you can afford to offer as a commission.
- Fixed share of the company’s annual profit – Take it to the next level by offering your salespeople a fixed share of the company’s annual profit as a yearly bonus. It doesn’t have to be anything crazy but it should be a meaningful amount of money. You can create a tiered structure where the longer someone stays with your company, the higher the share of the annual profit that they get.
This compensation structure can help you to attract ambitious people, retain them, and keep them motivated!
Offer Career Advancement Opportunities
Of course, while compensation is important, money is not the only thing that matters.
The kind of people you want to attract – ambitious, driven, talented – don’t want a cushy job with a nice salary that would allow them to coast through life.
In fact, that kind of scenario would seem like a nightmare to them because they would see that as stagnation. They don’t mind crazy ups and downs as long as they are moving forward. What they are afraid of is staying in the same place!
This means that if you want to retain people like that, you need to provide them with a stimulating, high-paced work environment where they constantly need to improve, face challenges, and grow.
You should also make it clear that everyone, including those with zero previous sales experience who start at the very bottom, can work their way up if they are willing to work hard, continuously improve their skills, and take on new responsibilities as they ascend the company’s hierarchy.
Make it a point to always promote from within instead of hiring from outside. This will motivate people who are serious about building a career in sales to do their best.
Also, offering real career advancement opportunities within your company will help you retain talent, which is important because having a revolving door of employees who come and go can be a huge drain on the company’s resources.
Employers often complain about employees job hopping every few years but usually, they only have themselves to blame. Why wouldn’t someone job-hop if it is the only way for them to progress in their careers?
But if you offer everyone an opportunity to work their way up within your company – and they actually see people around them getting promoted – then they won’t have much of an incentive to job hop. Why bother applying to jobs and going to interviews in your free time when you could simply focus on doing your best at your current job and get promoted?
Automate the Sales Process as Much as Possible
This one might seem like a weird piece of advice to give in the context of motivating your sales team but inefficiencies in the sales process can negatively impact your salespeople’s morale.
After all, they probably want to spend as much of their time as possible on reaching out to leads, having calls with them, and closing sales. That’s what you are paying them for, right?
But if your sales process isn’t streamlined, it can slow your salespeople down because they need to spend time dealing with various inefficiencies.
Do you really want them to waste their time doing repetitive tasks such as setting appointment reminders, sending follow-up emails, explaining to customers how to sign contracts digitally, etc.?
Or scour everything from email to Slack to Google Docs looking for information that is scattered all over the place?
Or rely on their fallible human memory to remember to follow up with leads and show up to discovery calls?
The more disorganized your sales process, the more time your salespeople will have to waste navigating it. And no one wants to deal with all that!
Moreover, the less automated your sales process, the more room there is for human error. If your salespeople are making 100+ cold calls a day, you can’t expect them to keep track of everything by themselves. They will inevitably start making mistakes, forgetting things, mixing up time zones, etc.
That’s why you want to automate everything as much as possible. You can do that with a combination of solid customer relationship management (CRM) software and an app like Zapier that allows you to connect various web apps to create an automated workflow.
All repetitive tasks should be automated so that your salespeople can focus on cold outreach, discovery calls, and closing sales instead of doing grunt work!
Provide Extensive Sales Training
Very few people are natural at sales.
Typically, those who appear to be such aren’t naturals, they are just extraordinarily motivated, hard-working, and persistent, which is how they reach such level of skill. But if you were to listen to their early sales calls, it would probably make you cringe!
That’s why you can’t just expect your salespeople to start closing sales left and right from day one. Instead, you need to provide them with extensive sales training to prepare them for the job and then continue to help them improve their sales skills for as long as they remain within your company.
Onboarding
Sales training during onboarding matters the most because that’s how you help new salespeople, some of whom may not have any previous sales experience at all, prepare for working in a sales role.
It should include:
- Target audience training – Who are your dream customers? Your salespeople should know their demographic and psychographic traits, what is the problem that they are struggling with, and how your product can help them solve that problem.
- Product training – You want your salespeople to get hands-on experience of using your product so that they would know it inside and out. This will help them set realistic expectations with potential customers, clearly articulate how your product provides a solution to their problem, and answer any questions that they might have.
- Psychology of persuasion – Sales is just persuasion in the business context so it makes sense to start by teaching new salespeople how persuasion works in general. We recommend focusing on Robert Cialdini’s seven principles of persuasion that he discusses in his landmark book “Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion”. Make sure to get the latest edition that includes the seventh principle (unity). This will serve as the foundation on which your salespeople can build their sales skills.
- Classic sales strategies and tactics – Once you are sure that your salespeople understand the general principles of persuasion, you can move on to classic sales strategies and tactics, such as the ones discussed in Brian Tracy’s book “The Psychology of Selling”.
- Sales in the digital age – Once you are done with classic sales strategies and tactics, you should discuss the unique challenges of selling in the digital age. Daniel H. Pink’s “To Sell Is Human” is a great book on this.
You should also give your salespeople a cold calling framework and organize roleplaying sessions so that they have the opportunity to get some practice with that framework before they start making real cold calls and talking to potential customers.
Ideally, you also want to give them a discovery call framework and organize roleplaying sessions for practicing it. This will be more time-consuming than roleplaying cold calls because discovery calls tend to be much longer. However, keep in mind that even going through the framework just a few times can make a huge difference.
Such extensive sales training will equip your salespeople with the knowledge that they need to succeed at their jobs and give them the confidence to pick up the phone and start making those calls.
It will also help them stay motivated in the face of rejection, awkwardness, and embarrassment that they will inevitably have to deal with while learning how to sell.
Sure, all that is still going to feel bad, but at least they will have some context, frameworks, and a general idea of what they should be doing that they can use to orient themselves.
Regular Sales Training
Once new salespeople complete the onboarding and start working in their sales role, you want to provide regular sales training so that they can continue improving their sales skills in a structured manner.
Say, you could organize a sales training day once every quarter where you either bring in a guest speaker or take your sales team to an event where they can learn from more experienced salespeople (e.g. a sales seminar, an industry conference, etc.).
Regular sales training like this can help your salespeople stay motivated by giving them a sense of progress where they can see that they are learning new things and improving their skills.
Ongoing One-on-One Mentorship
You also want to provide ongoing one-on-one mentorship where junior salespeople get assigned a senior salesperson as a mentor.
Ideally, they should have a meeting with their mentor once a week so that they can discuss what’s on their minds, get feedback on their strengths and weaknesses, and determine what they should be focusing on.
The mentor should also provide emotional support during that initial difficult period when a new salesperson is getting used to constant rejection.
It’s easy to feel like a failure and want to quit after a bad day. A senior colleague reminding you that what you are going through is completely normal and that there is light at the end of the tunnel can make a huge difference!
Create a Supportive Work Environment
Work environment is one of the main factors that affect employee morale.
That’s why it’s so important to create a positive and supportive work environment where your salespeople feel valued and appreciated.
Sales can be extremely stressful, especially for people who don’t have any previous experience in this field.
One of the best things that you can do to help your sales team stay motivated and prevent burnout is to create a company culture where people are encouraged to proactively manage stress.
You can even teach stress management techniques as a part of sales training:
- 4-4-4-4 breathing technique that is also known as “box breathing”. You inhale while counting to four, hold your breath while counting to four, exhale while counting to four, and then hold your breath once again while counting to four. This breathing technique has a calming effect and can be used to manage anxiety prior to a cold call or a discovery call. It can also be helpful if you need to recenter yourself after an unpleasant interaction with a potential customer.
- Taking a 15-minute walk. Some interactions with potential customers can be so unpleasant that box breathing won’t be enough. In such a case, it might make sense to go outside for a short walk. It’s better to take a 15-minute break to clear your head than to continue stewing and let that one unpleasant interaction ruin the entire day.
- Celebrating small wins. People have a tendency to take their accomplishments for granted but beat themselves up over every failure, no matter how minor. This is unhealthy in any context, but it’s especially destructive in sales because learning to sell inevitably involves dealing with a deluge of rejection, awkwardness, and embarrassment. That’s why it’s so important to intentionally celebrate wins, even the small ones. Okay, the cold call went terribly, but at least you made it. That’s better than nothing, right? Encourage your salespeople to adopt this mindset instead of endlessly beating themselves up. You might also want to make it a point to celebrate wins at the end of each day as a team so that everyone would end the day on a positive note.
It’s also important to remember that your salespeople are human beings who have lives outside of work.
Everyone goes through dark periods in life: illnesses, divorces, and deaths. If someone’s performance is declining, it might be that they are dealing with some personal stuff.
Instead of coming at them with guns blazing and demanding an explanation as to why they are not meeting their targets, consider asking them what’s going on and if there’s anything that you can do to help.
Realistically, if you manage to retain talent for years or even decades, they will probably have episodes like that, even if they are otherwise a top performer. It makes more sense to be supportive instead of putting pressure on them. In all likelihood, they are going to get back on track eventually, it might just take some time.
Set Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Cold Outreach Quotas
Finally, you want to encourage your salespeople to focus on what they can control instead of stressing about what is beyond their control.
A great way to do that is to set daily, weekly, and monthly cold outreach quotas.
Barring some crazy and extremely unlikely events, your salespeople have complete control over how many leads they call on any given day. And that’s what they should focus on.
After all, if they make enough cold calls, they will probably end up scheduling some discovery calls and closing some sales.
And sure, it is possible to be so bad at cold calling that you fail to schedule a single discovery call, but if you have someone like that on your team, their mentor should help them improve.
Realistically, though, if you trained your salespeople well, this “numbers game” approach should help them start closing sales. And once they do, they will begin trusting the process, and feel more motivated to continue making those cold calls!
Want to Learn How to Scale Sales FAST?
Generating leads via cold outreach is an uphill battle. Why?
Because getting a call from a complete stranger who wants to sell them something immediately puts people on guard. You’d probably be on guard too if you were in their shoes!
Moreover, cold calling is likely going to continue declining in effectiveness due to people’s increasing “phone anxiety”.
Gen Z and Millennials simply don’t like talking on the phone, especially with random strangers who call them up out of the blue!
When you consider all that, it becomes clear that while cold outreach can be a great way to get a brand new business off the ground, you probably shouldn’t remain reliant on it forever.
Instead, we recommend building an automated lead generation funnel where you use a lead magnet to get your dream customers to come to you instead of chasing after them.
Once you have your lead generation funnel in place, all you need to do in order to generate leads is to drive traffic to it.
In fact, depending on what it is that you sell, you may be able to not only generate leads but also close sales on autopilot!
Our co-founder Russell Brunson can walk you through creating such a funnel step-by-step in our 5 Day Lead Challenge.
You will:
- Create your first lead magnet
- Build your first lead generation funnel
- Set up a six-email welcome sequence
…and launch your funnel in just five days!
So don’t hesitate. Take action now. Building a lead generation funnel can help you grow your business faster than you ever thought possible!
Join Our 5 Day Lead Challenge Today!
P.S. This challenge is completely FREE!