Everyone needs a little motivation now and then. But sales professionals need motivation in overdrive. Sales managers with huge discretionary budgets can go out and hire top talent to coach and motivate their sales teams. But who has such a budget? Well, turns out that throwing money at coaching and motivating is not the answer anyway. To help you bring out the best in your team, Selling Power magazine asked three motivational coaches – an award-winning high school math teacher, a life coach who specializes in career fulfillment, and a pioneer in the television home-shopping industry – to share their motivational secrets, and here they are.
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rSam Calavitta: Teach Them to Believe in Themselves

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When you think excitement, you might not think calculus, but that’s just because you’ve never met Sam Calavitta, a math teacher at Fairmont Preparatory Academy in Anaheim, CA. Calavitta will do anything to inspire his students, from organizing quiz-show style contests in class to offering private tutoring sessions during his lunch hour. As a result, he has garnered national accolades, including the 2009 Siemens Award, which recognizes “exemplary teaching and enthusiastic dedication to students.” 

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Calavitta, who has nine children of his own, believes there’s no such thing as unteachable students. “Believe in them long and hard enough, then they won’t give up,” Calavitta says. “Every mistake they make turns into a positive learning experience.”

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And his numbers really do add up: Last year, his 81 pupils earned an average score of 4.79 out of 5 on the AP calculus exam, and 69 of them earned a perfect score. “It’s not my job to place limits on them,” says Calavitta. “It’s my job to believe in them and hope that, as a result, they begin to believe in themselves.”

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When he isn’t teaching, Calavitta coaches wrestling, and he finds many similarities between the classroom and the gym. “Any coach knows that an athlete does not become great by rushing through the fundamentals,” he says. “Greatness can’t be rushed but must be practiced and drilled daily and then integrated into a comprehensive process. For example, a good baseball coach would never teach batting on Monday, throwing on Tuesday, catching on Wednesday, bunting on Thursday, and base running on Friday and then expect the players to put it all together flawlessly in a game on Saturday. Instead, a good coach, like a good manager, would do a little each day through creative drills and game scenarios. Helping them integrate skills is how you prepare people for the real game.”

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Not surprisingly, Calavitta believes that fun, competition, and variety are important components of the teaching process. “We all know that people are most successful when doing something that they enjoy,” he says. “As head coach of my ‘mathletes,’ I take great care in creating lesson plans that are dynamic and interesting.”

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But even more important than making learning fun is keeping it personal. “My coaching is all done in an ultrapositive environment where failure is not an option. My students know from the minute I greet each one of them at the door on the first day of class in September that they are important to me and that I will give 110 percent each day. In return, I expect the same. There just isn’t room for the I-can’t zone in our classroom.”
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rKathee Hill: Help Them Focus on the Small Steps that Lead to the Big Goal

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“People are pretty savvy, and most of the time they know when something is out of balance or missing in their lives,” says Kathee Hill (lifecoach.com), an associate certified coach with the International Coach Federation and a graduate of Coach University. “They just need a coach to help them bring their own wisdom out.” To do that, Hill asks questions such as, “What are the top five things you’d like to accomplish in the next six months? What about over the next three years?” 

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“Most of my clients have long-range plans,” she says, “but often have no idea how to make these big dreams happen. It’s my job to help them break the task into small steps and then sequence those steps until we ultimately find the step that they can take that very day. Then I ask, ‘Does this feel doable?’”

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If clients can’t figure out what the first step might be in reaching a long-term goal, Hill sees that as a warning sign that “they’ve glommed on to the wrong goal.” She continues, “Often we have ‘should’ goals – that is, things we’ve always told ourselves we should do, whether it’s go back to school for an advanced degree or lose twenty pounds, but these aren’t things for which we have a real passion. I tell people to get rid of their ‘should’ goals and focus on something they really want to do. Otherwise, they’ll never complete the process.”

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Once a manager has guided a salesperson through goal setting and creating a time frame, Hill says there’s a third step to coaching: helping the person to prioritize. “Ask that person, ‘What are the three to five things you most need to do today?’” she suggests. “A huge to-do list is overwhelming because three to five priorities are all that most people can handle.”

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Coaches serve a final important function in a client’s life: requiring accountability. “In school, we’re accountable to our teachers,” says Hill, “and as adults most of us haven’t changed that much. We need someone to report to. Managers can certainly serve that function and create a time frame for follow-up conversations. Some people are visionaries who respond well to long-term goal setting, but most people respond best to small-step goals and frequent check-ins, whether by phone, email, or in person.”

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Hill, who cites Cheryl Richardson’s Take Time for Your Life: A Personal Coach’s 7-Step Program for Creating the Life You Want (Broadway, 1999) and Talane Miedaner’s Coach Yourself to Success: 101 Tips from a Personal Coach for Reaching Your Goals at Work and Life (McGraw-Hill, 2000) as the primary sources for her ideas, says the perfect way to wind up a coaching session is to “summarize the main focus of the meeting. You might want to help [attendants] come up with a theme for the next week or a motto based on their top priority, such as ‘listen’ or ‘delegate small details’ or ‘get in front of more clients.’ It may sound silly, but your primary functions as a coach are to keep your players focused on the steps that will actually lead them to complete their goals and keep them from becoming overwhelmed and distracted by unimportant things. Mottos and themes can help.” 
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rBob Circosta: Keep It Fast and Focused

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As TV’s original home-shopping host, Bob Circosta has made 75,000 product presentations, logged more than 25,000 hours of live selling, and individually sold more than $1 billion in merchandise. Not bad for someone who didn’t even start out as a salesman.
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Circosta’s unlikely career began 31 years ago on a small talk-radio station in Florida. “We covered politics and issues of the day, but we weren’t very popular,” he admits, “and as a result, our owner, Bud Paxson, wasn’t having a lot of success selling ad time. Once he sold a thirteen-week contract to an appliance store, but when he went in to collect the money, the owner was furious. He told Bud that not a single person had come into the store as a result of the radio ad, and he threatened not to pay us. He finally offered Bud a box of electric can openers in exchange for the money he owed us, and Bud was so frustrated he took it.” 

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Circosta was halfway through his afternoon program when Paxson walked into the booth holding an avocado-green can opener. Circosta remembers, “He said, “Bob, when you finish the news, I need you to get on the air and try to sell this can opener.’

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“I said, ‘Wait a minute. Sell? I’m a news man,’ and Paxson responded, ‘Do you want to get paid this week or not?’”

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Not a very promising beginning for what would ultimately become the Home Shopping Network, but Circosta gamely started describing the can openers to listeners, and within minutes the phone lines lit up. He sold 112 can openers the first day – enough to convince Paxson that the station could make more money selling products than selling ad time.

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“That was 1977, and we were so small that if the wind was right our signal maybe went around the block,” says Circosta. But his 2:00 p.m. “product spotlight” quickly became the most popular segment on the station, and when the county was wired for cable in 1982, the Home Shopping Club was born. In 1985 it went nationwide as the Home Shopping Network (HSN).

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“We were just trying to make payroll,” says Circosta, who still guests on HSN. “Who knew that selling one hundred and twelve can openers would lead to an industry that generates ten billion dollars a year?” 

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In the process of pitching 75,000 products, Circosta has developed a “billion-dollar formula,” which he now teaches to managers and sales reps (bobcircosta.com). “A home shopping channel is raw selling,” he says. “We have a rating system called DPM, as in ‘dollars per minute,’ and there’s a computer in front of me giving constant feedback, literally showing me how much I’m selling every minute. I immediately see when something is working and when it isn’t. But all sales have DPM, even those that take place across a conference table. Once you’ve learned how to master your message, you can look into a customer’s face and see the same sort of data I see on my computer.”

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Circosta believes that salespeople make two common mistakes. The first is that “they become too focused on their own opinion and goal, and they lose sight of how things look to the other person.”

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He explains, “I remember once, early on, when I was expected to sell a combination AM/FM radio and toilet-paper dispenser. I thought it was a ridiculous product, but we sold five thousand in nine minutes. I learned that day that it’s not important what I think; it’s important what the customer thinks. You have to look at everything from the customer’s perspective and whether or not you can either solve a problem for him or her or answer an emotional need.” 

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The second mistake that salespeople often make is failing to focus their message and delivering a rambling sales pitch. “In my seminars, we have a little, mock home-shopping program to remind the students that when it comes to sales, time really is money,” says Circosta. “It’s entertaining, but boy, do they learn. When they can literally see that ticking clock, they learn to deliver quicker and more effectively.”