So, I work in a tech company, and it seems like our sales team does the bare minimum and spends the rest of the day gaming. They sometimes manage to hit their targets, sure, but there’s zero ambition. It’s like everyone’s just here to punch the clock and wait for the next game drop. I get that work life balance is important, but this seems extreme. Anyone else experiencing this in their workplace? How does your team stay motivated?
Half our sales team is just cruising along discussing video games all day. Is this the new normal or should I be worried?
byu/junkai90 inEntrepreneur
Posted by junkai90
10 Comments
Pay them more? Make work the game, but pay them more and incentive hitting targets.
Because at the end of the day it’s just a job to them. It’s not like they can ever get rich from working in sales like you can as an owner. Of course they’re gonna care less
normal – fire the underproducers
Honestly, if your team lacks ambition, it’s probably a leadership problem. People don’t slack off unless they’re uninspired by their work or leaders. Maybe look in the mirror first.
Sounds like perhaps too high of a base salary or too small of a commission. When one of them earns an extra $100k from a good deal, the others will take note, if they’re capped or the product is shit, what do you expect?
If they’re hitting targets while jerking it half the time, you can always move the targets.
That being said this isn’t 1930. Everyone is wised up to the fact that business owners don’t actually give a fuck about them. It’s a trade. I work you give me money.
If I wanted to pour blood sweat and tears in im not doing it for 5% of the pie. I’ll go do my own thing and keep almost all of it. I would imagine a lot of others feel the same
This is the future of work. The 9 to 5 grind is dead, and if people can balance productivity with gaming or other interests, let them. Maybe you’re the one stuck in the past?
I believe it comes down to the culture that the ownership has put in place.
When you build a company as an owner, you need to build it big enough to fit any dreams that your team may have, you know, inside of it. If they want to make a million dollars, you need to find a path that would let them make a million dollars.
It sounds like they’re not as motivated as they should be.
I spent twenty-five years in full commission.Boiler, room sales floors, making phone calls.
We were the most bloodthirsty, hungry money, loving sons of bitches ever. It was a boiler room. We were trying to get as many deals as we could. From the time the bell rang until the bell rang every single day.
I remember the first week I got on the phone after setting appointments for a closers that couldn’t close.
I read the stupid twenty eight page script. I kept reading the parts you weren’t supposed to read like.Put your name here.
Eventually I stopped for 5 minutes and I highlighted all the things I was not supposed to say.
I gave it another shot and went through it on a cold call, and I closed the deal and made twelve hundred dollars.
My bills were like two thousand dollars a month at the time I was ecstatic.
It was a thursday and by the end of day, on friday I had made $5750.00 + $3000 cash bonus.
Every single day for years until the company shut down and was sold. I was there early and I tried to stay late. I would call Hawaii at 11pm cst.
It’s up to the leaders to set the tone. If it’s not where it’s supposed to be, then it needs to be reset. The number one asset of any business is your employees.
This is really common in tech from what I’ve seen, and it’s not great for growth. We ended up working with our HR on this and looked into ways to push underperforming reps into a better mindset. Daily standups are an obvious way to add the peer pressure element, but a more healthy idea we found was sitting them down privately and having them map out how their time is actually getting spent each day. Simple pen and paper works, theres also some free sites for it, [cloudburst.it](http://cloudburst.it) is a great one for visualization with nice charts and graphs doing all the maths. But it really comes down to whether they want to improve or not. If you want a top performing sales floor you need everyone in the same zone, otherwise the lazier reps will drag down the rest. Ideally you need to hire more carefully and fire fast before an issue starts to spread.
What video games? 😊