Learn to Motivate Your Team

A guide to the simple things you can do to create a successful team.

Introduction
The Plan
5 Ways to Improve NPS - Net Promoter Score
6 Benefits of Teams Competing and Collaborating
20 Songs That Will Motivate Your Sales Team
The Science
People, Personalization and Productivity
The Science Behind Motivating Behavioral Change
Start implenting these ideas today!

Introduction

Congratulations, on taking the first step to motivating your team. Within this eBook you will tips from our experienced team on how you can change behaviors and build a successful team.

We've split this ebook into two sections "The Plan" and "The Science", learn about actionable items you can implement today to improve the success of your team. Then find out the science behind it all and why these simple changes will transform your team.

The Plan

This section is filled with ways to improve your team and even the satisfaction level of your customers.

The Science

Now that you know what you can do to change the motivation of your staff. Learn the science behind it and why these simple tactics really change behaviors.

Enjoy!

We wrote this ebook so that you and your staff can improve and become more successful. We are dedicated to motivating teams and we want to make sure you get the most out of this book.

If you have any questions reach out to us at https://spinify.com

The Plan

Find actionable changes you can make today to improve your team and even the satisfaction level of your customers.

5 Ways to Improve NPS - Net Promoter Score

The Concept

Customer service is entrenched in most companies. Many think they are doing it well. They usually rate themselves higher than their competitors, when asked the question. However, without quantitative measurement this “rating” probably indicates a common cognitive bias known as the Lake Wobegon effect. It is named after the fictional town that figured in Garrison Keillor’s novels and his radio broadcast, Prairie Home Companion. In this town "all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average."

The Reality

Many organizations do not grasp the full importance of customer service beyond responding quickly to issues and questions. They see it as an efficiency measure. How fast was a query responded to and the case closed. The see the role as post purchase and performed by a service department.

Some see it as a retention strategy. Few, however, give it the weight it deserves as the key component of influencing whether an existing customer will recommend your product or services to another company. Clever companies are moving away from the traditional customer service view to one of cultivating and ensuring customer relationships. They recognize its role in informing and converting potential customers at pre-purchase. They consider it a key component of their marketing message and their brand.

NPS goes hand in glove with value statements espousing customer centricity.

NPS or Net promoter Score is a management tool used to assess the loyalty of your company customer relationships. A customer responds to a survey following a phone call or to a written request for feedback. It is usually a single question. NPS has been widely adopted by forward thinking companies with more than two thirds of Fortune 1000 companies using the metric. It's important to measure what matters and how customers think about you and their willingness to recommend you to others is a key metric

to measure.

Explaining the Ratings

The Net Promoter Score is calculated based on responses to the question: How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague? The scoring for this answer is usually based on a 0 to 10 scale.Those who respond with a score of 9 to 10 are called Promoters, and are considered likely to exhibit value-creating behaviors, such as buying more, remaining customers for longer, and making more positive referrals to other potential customers.

Those who respond with a score of 0 to 6 are labeled Detractors, and they are believed to be less likely to exhibit the value-creating behaviors. Responses of 7 and 8 are labeled Passives, and their behavior falls in the middle of Promoters and Detractors. The NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of customers who are Detractors from the percentage of customers who are Promoters. For purposes of calculating a Net Promoter Score, Passives count towards the total number of respondents, thus decreasing the percentage of detractors and promoters.

How to Improve

Here are five key factors to keep in mind to improve your NPS:

1) Take it seriously: If you invest time and effort in running NPS surveys you need to commit to taking the results seriously. When managers or staff

don't like the scores, they often look for excuses to discount the findings. They should respect their customers enough to accept their feedback and look for ways to improve their individual and team rating.

2) Communicate internally: Staff need to understand the objectives of measuring NPS and how improving it drives better business results. Use your internal communications to ensure that all employees know you are undertaking the program; train them in how to respond to customers at every interaction, inform every one of the findings; and help them understand how to improve.

3) Understand your impact: NPS scores are not just related to your customer service division. It is impacted by every aspect of your business. If the salesperson fails to return a call, or the website goes down without a notification to product users, the end result is that customers are impacted and their user experience deteriorates. Everyone is accountable for NPS, measure them, display them for all to see and look for improvements everyday.

4) It's not just about the end customer: In a B2B environment, partners are just as important as customers. They are often a source of new clients so treat them as key components of your sales and revenue cycle. If they are unhappy or dissatisfied with your performance, they won’t recommend your products or your company. And we all know how important word of mouth and social commentary is to growing sales.

5) Leverage your promoters: When you identify clients who say they are likely to recommend your business, ask them can you get a testimonial. Write a story about their experience and put it everywhere, website, blog, social media. As for detractors, reach out and talk to them, as painful as that might be. Understand their issues and what happened. Tell them what you've done as a result of their feedback and make sure you deliver on the promise of better service.

Conclusion

Measuring customer service moves it from its traditional place in the corporate hierarchy as a cost center to a recognition of the important part

it plays in delivering profit and other business outcomes. Forward-thinking companies are promoting their NPS as part of their strategy to build real brand advocacy.

Having captured the NPS, they should be displayed on a leaderboard so that the entire office can see the performance. They can see high performing individuals and learn from them as part of training. They can see poor performers and provide training or coaching to lift their skills and expertise. That's how you change a rating, a company culture, by everyone being on the same page and focused on the metrics that matter.

6 Benefits of Teams Competing and Collaborating

An Overview of Teams

There is an adage that "if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go with a team." Put another way competition makes individuals run harder and faster while collaboration makes us work better for holistic outcomes.

People are competitive by nature. As children we compete with our siblings for our parent's attention. At school we compete against individuals or team in sports. As adults we compete with peers for the best jobs, and with coworkers for a raise or promotion.

Sales in particular is known for its dog-eat-dog, target oriented environment which often pits colleagues against each other. Organizations get great results from encouraging healthy competition amongst individuals, especially with a leaderboard that shows staff performance in a transparent manner. They can however leverage this competition by putting individuals into teams where a company can reap the business benefits of both competition and collaboration.

Organizations are increasingly chasing more aggressive growth goals and the pressure of quarterly reporting so the question is whether high performance comes from promoting competition amongst reps or encouraging collaboration. Let’s explore!

Why Should Teams Compete?

Competition is traditionally how organizations have driven their staff , particularly sales staff. Some of the benefits have included the following:

Motivation - Leaderboards that show staff performance by ranking their activities and progress towards a target drives some people to work harder especially if there is a prize for "winning" the competition. The closeness of colleagues can induce a sense of urgency. They crave the reward, as well as the personal sense of accomplishment.

Promote innovation - Competition encourages staff to look for to improve. They might streamline an existing process or define a new approach to speed up the sales cycle. They might use technology to make more calls or automate emails so that the pipeline moves with minimal interaction. Social media might be employed to maintain informal communication links and provide product updates to everyone who follows the person or the company.

Remove complacency - Competition pushes people out of their comfort zone. Striving to be number one requires extra effort and tenacity. Excellent sales reps have a big enough ego to survive the slings and arrows of client interaction. They are able to handle rejection and move on quickly to the next prospect or activity. This is a rare attribute.

The downside to competition is that employees don’t mentor under performing colleagues. They don't share their secrets to success in case someone uses their approach to beat them to the prize. They preserve the opportunity to achieve higher individual goals, often at the expense of company objectives.

Why Should Teams Collaborate?

Collaboration encourages staff to work with each other instead of against each other. This provides the environment to leverage best practices and increase efficiency and effectiveness. In a collaborative situation, everyone feels safe to share their best practices and learnings to help the

organization succeed as a whole.

Learn from each other - Collaboration provides an opportunity to learn from each other’s successes and failures to enable a learning organizational approach. This is how companies prepare strategies and scenarios for unanticipated changes in their eco-system. It also allows the company to focus on a mixture of short and long term goals by assigning tasks to those best able to deliver against these targets.

Break down barriers - Collaboration within a single department is important,however the biggest uplift in results comes from extending that collaborative approach across all departments in an organization. Highly successful companies made include Partners and Suppliers in this collaboration in order to ensure all links in the supply chain are operating effectively. This also provides a great feedback loop as everyone contributes information to the company knowledge base about customers and products.

A culture of collaboration eliminates silos of data, information, and communication allowing everyone to express their opinion and expertise to better deliver the company goals.

Share goals - Setting goals on a team performance level encourages a better level of staff engagement. It motivates everyone to share common objectives rather than a "what's in it for me" approach. It is still important to recognize individual contributions within the team environment and celebrate the achievement of milestones.

Can't we have Both?

The recent taco ad suggests we don't have to chose one approach over another. The best teams encourage both collaboration and competition – reps should collaborate with their peers to compete against the industry and competitors. Engaged staff can help their company outperform the competition by up to 202%.

One of the key things to focus on is that collaboration isn’t about ‘leveling the playing field’. It is about helping each person perform to their best level

and achieve success for the company as well as themselves.

And it’s important to note a few things about competition.

It doesn’t have to be on an individual level – it can be on a group or team level, or there can be multiple winners.
It doesn’t always have to be revenue-based. The best way to deliver better business results is to focus staff on the activities that build to the eventual sale or closed deal. This could be emails sent or phone calls completed. It could also be about deals advanced through the sales stage or meetings set up with clients.
It doesn’t have to include a monetary reward. Winners could receive experiences such as a balloon flight or a half day off work, a team dinner or even a certificate or medal to hang at their desk.

The Role of Technology

Spinify solutions empower today’s workforce by connecting employees across offices or keeping them up to date when they are out of the office. Motivational enablement tools such as leaderboards provide the foundation for competition and collaboration in the workplace. They use real-time data from a company's data app and re-visualizes it as a ranking and individual information on a TV or a smart phone app. Leaderboards can focus on individuals or teams so that a company can chose the best approach for the problems they face right now. They also introduce the key aspects of gamification with points, badges and levels so that staff achievement is on display for all to see with these simple adornments.

Companies achieve better results with leaderbaords that encourage a variety of motivational approaches, competition or collaboration. You choose what it will be today!

20 Songs That Will Motivate Your Sales Team

Songs and Sales Motivation

When employees are engaged their performance improves. Music may soothe the soul however it can also pump you up and improve work productivity. Studies show that music can make you work harder and faster. In a UK Study, 40% of Sales Managers said playing the right music could actually boost sales. Some believed that the energy that went into making the music would be absorbed by the listener’s body and redirected in work activities.

The Spinify team wondered what made up an engaging and motivating Playlist? After some discussion here’s our compilation of sales motivational songs to get your team pumped (and productive).

Motivational Songs for New sales Activities

Overcome call reluctance and rise to the challenge of making those calls with Eye of the Tiger, Survivor. It reminds us to thrive, not just survive in sales. Some people need coffee to get revved up for tackling those new sales activities however Start Me Up, The Rolling Stones will have your staff engaged and motivated for the day ahead.

People who are new to sales often wonder if they will be successful. The Star performers around them make it look so easy to close the deal. They sometimes forget that the deal is won only after a lot of other, smaller activities have been completed. There is no easy path to success. That’s the

cold, hard truth. It’s a Long way to The Top, AC/DC. Perseverance ultimately separates the star performers from the also rans and at the end of the day You Get What You Give, New Radicals.

We made competitions that allow you to match competency of team members to targets. This means more of them will get that winning feeling. Once your team members have tasted winning they will never want to stop selling. They will be Hungry Like the Wolf, Duran Duran.

Motivational Songs for Daily Activities

Sometimes the work of the sales rep seems a lot like a admin. From a company perspective the client data is very important and you need reps to put real time updates into your data App or CRM. This is especially true if you turn this information into a game to engage and motivate employees to do more activities. On a slow sales week running incentive competitions inside games can remind team members Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,Michael Jackson.

For some team member it can seem as though rather than work being like a Flower, Moby it is more like Welcome to the Jungle, Guns and Roses. This is the time for managers to assure them that they can be successful if they are a Believer, Imagine Dragons.

Motivational Songs for Difficult Customer Conversations

Sometimes trying to talk to clients, following up with many phone calls, emails or drip campaigns isn’t getting you any closer to closing the deal. It seems that the client is delighting in turning you Right Round, Flo Rida.

This is the time to look to the left, look to the right, look all around for new solutions and ways to pull the customer to choosing your product. You don’t need a little black book. You just need a Little Green Bag, George Baker.

Sometimes it’s worth looking at the pipeline with fresh eyes and honestly evaluating what’s in there. It’s easy to think a big pipeline is great. However

never mistake quantity for quality. It may be time to say that your product is not a good fit for the client or that the client is not a good fit for your company. It’s OK to replace Honey with Client and say Honey I’m Good, Andy Grammer.

Sometimes employees become demotivated if they don’t feel that they aren't being successful and managers may need to intervene and Build Me Up ButterCup, The Foundations before they get down in the dumps about sales and start checking Job Boards or doing the Leek Spin, Xyliex.

Motivation Songs for Closing the Deal

Then it happens. You can feel the sale. It’s ready to close. It’s The Final Countdown, Europe. You may have got knocked down but you got up again and now you can reap the rewards of all that hard work by TubThumping, Chumawamba.

Some clients can be tough negotiators and they may offer you the sale based on a deeper discount or more friendly Terms and Conditions or a longer warranty period. This is the time to seek the advice of experienced business people who know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, just like The Gambler,Kenny Rogers.

Motivational Songs to Celebrate Sales

Some competitions reward individuals and some engage and motivate the entire team to reach the goal. So whether you as an individual are Simply the Best, Tina Turner or the whole team is fist pumping the air because We are the Champions, Queen, it’s definitely time for a Celebration, Kool and the Gang. After ringing the gong and winning the leaderboard you could Take the Money and Run, Steve Miller Band.

Conclusion

So, there you have it. The Spinify Top 20. What are yours? What song do you turn to when you need inspiration, an adrenaline rush or you want to celebrate.

The Science

Learn the reasons behind how these simple changes will improve your team.

People, Personalization and Productivity

The Golden Rule

Psychological studies showed that a proper fit between personality and environment can raise productivity and engagement in the workplace. Mangers would do well to forget the "golden rule" that says treat others as you would want to be treated and start treating people as they want to be treated.

People want to be recognized as an individual where their personal preferences are considered by management and the organization as a whole. This becomes particularity relevant when we talk about displaying a person's image. Very few employment contracts ask employees to hand over the rights to use of their image yet people's faces are often displayed in the workplace without the necessary consideration of how employees would like to be represented in company profiles, on company websites and on internal leaderboards.

How Spinify Personalizes Leaderboards

Spinify is all about tailoring the workplace experience to the individual employee. We already know that staff engagement and motivation is significantly increased when employees are provided to performance content of personal relevance.

Leaderboards are an excellent way to show performance information of personal relevance as staff can see their raw score activity performance

and their progress against their target or KPI. Most managers presume that their staff want to show their faces as the image on the leaderboard. However this may not be correct. Cultural, body image, religious and other reasons may affect this decision and it is best to have an Avatar option for each individual as well as a selfie.

Leaderboards provide immediate performance feedback and prompt staff to focus on achieving their KPI's. providing staff with an option for a selfie or an avatar gives them a sense of respect and empowerment and that drives engagement and productivity.

Spinify Moods

Trying to show feelings in people is difficult. Spinify does this by asking people to load up either three selfies or three avatars showing their Awesome Face, their Happy face and their Sad Face. If you chose an Avatar then our clever software works out the three face types and automatically applies them to your leaderboard identity.

Show performance emotion with moods

Moods allow some emotion to be displayed as staff progress in their

completion of activities and their ranking on the leaderboard. It's awesome to be number one but sad if you are falling behind.

Conclusion

All staff appreciate being treated as individuals. Talking to staff and asking

them how they want to be represented on a leaderboard will build trust and respect which leads to better engagement and motivation.

The Science Behind Motivating Behavioral Change

What do we Want

Every organization (and most people) are looking for ways to motivate behavioural change in others. For companies the behavior change they are looking for is getting staff to do more work. They want employees to do more of the activities that drive better business outcomes. It is ensuring employees focus on what the company wants done rather than what the staff member may prefer to do while at work.

To achieve behavioral change, many organizations focus on motivation. They put up inspirational posters, hire in motivational speakers or undertake outdoors team building activities to get staff engaged and motivated. The positive impact of an inspirational speech is usually short lived as people get back to their day to day activities.

Some organizations assume that people will change their attitudes and behavior when presented with new information. The high rates of smokers prove knowledge and awareness are not enough to change behavior. Similarly offering extrinsic rewards may not affect behavior change especially in the long term.

The Concept

So if behavioral change is not about being inspired or informed, what is it

about? Since time began many philosophers have proposed ways to understand persuasion, influence and behavior change. Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, alongside Socrates and Plato laid much of the groundwork for modern western philosophy.

In more recent times, one of the most influential people in the field of human behavior design is Dr. BJ Fogg. He founded the Persuasive Tech Lab at Stanford University, where he directs research and design. He also works with industry and organizations to apply his approach in real life situations.

He hypothesizes that designing for behavior change is systematic. It's not guesswork. It's not art, it is a science. Like all good science it has a formula which is described as: B=MAT. That translates as Behavior equals Motivation, Ability and a Trigger.

B=MAT Explained

Behavior is the outcome you want. To be effective it needs to be specific. For sales people this might be call 50 clients today, or send 25 introductory emails to prospects, or write 10 quotes for potential buyers. To achieve a successful outcome a company needs to make the target behavior as simple as possible in order to increase the individual's ability to complete the expected behavior.

The more complex the behavior, the less likely the individual is to feel motivated. Also the less likely they are to have the ability to execute the activities. If the expected behavior is to make 50 client calls and send 25 introductory emails and write 10 quotes then the behavior is more complex. Employees become confused about the priority of activities and what they should do first. The old adage applies Keep It Simple, Sweetie, in order to get the best out of your employees.

Motivation is the desire to do something. BJ Fogg highlights three Core Motivators, which are central to the human experience. They are: Sensation, Anticipation, and Belonging. Each of these motivators can have a positive or negative aspect. Sensation can be pleasure or pain. Anticipation can be in the form of hope or fear Belonging is one of the strongest motivators that exists and can be expressed as acceptance or

rejection.

Many bad behaviors have involved isolating people based on their difference (be that gender, religion, ethnicity or other aspects of humanity). Such behaviors often result in workplace harassment leading to suicide or violence. Inclusion and bonding with others is a more highly motivating factor for most people.

Ability defines if the person can do the behavior that is specified. In order to perform a target behavior, a person must have the ability to do so. There are two paths to increasing ability. You can train people, giving them more skills. The alternate is to make the target behavior easier to do. BJ Fogg calls this simplicity. Making the target behavior simple means you increase the confidence of the individual in their ability.

Trigger is the reminder or prompt to do something. It is a cue that alerts the individual to perform the behavior. Triggers can be designed. In companies this is certainly a good approach. The use of technology implies a more objective approach and one that is repeatable. The goal is to design technology that enables people who are already motivated to easily succeed in the behavior once they are triggered.

B=MAT and Leaderboards

Leaderboards provide a perfect example of where B=MAT comes to fruition in a workplace. Leaderboards provide immediate performance feedback to individuals and teams. The rankings show the level of activities or behaviors that have been executed. When there is a change in the leaderboard rankings; for example a colleague has been overtaken or has risen to the top of the ladder, then a notification is sent to all players. This notification acts as the trigger. It is a call to action, a “do it now”.

The expected behavior is to do more of the activities that are being measured on the leaderboard. The motivation is the opportunity to climb to the top of the leaderboard and be recognized by peers.

Ability plays an important part in the successful use of this formula. Staff need to have the correct levels of training and support to undertake the

behaviors that are expected. The easier it is for them to adopt the new behavior the more readily they will perform in that capacity.

Fortunately a leaderboard can trigger training, coaching or counselling behaviors with managers as they see their staff failing to achieve the expected behavior.

Conclusion

The right combination of motivation and ability when triggered appropriately, will result in the desired behavior by moving the individual through any barriers to execution.

Start implenting these ideas today!

Now that you've learned how to motivate your team, its time to start implementing those great ideas.

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