Making a great sales staff is what happens over time when top producers come together with the right attitude, right environment and right support. Your sales team will evolve. If you manage it well, it will evolve into a great team. If you manage it not-so-well, your company can become known as "the revolving door" because of your turn over.

So, what ever you say to your staff will be taken to heart, taken in and will function to either keep them motivated producers, or to discourage them into non-production. Your words of affirmation help to function as psychological maintenance for your team. This is especially important if your team members are not particularly spiritual. Most spiritual people have a book or set of teachings that help them to stay focused each day in a positive way. Those who do not have a church, synagogue or other spiritual habit [such as meditation] are frequently lost as to how to keep their internal "motor running."

For the non-church group, you will need to "feed" them so that the gray matter between the ears stays moving in the right direction for the productivity of your company. The easiest way to do this is with words of affirmation; encouraging words and positive reinforcement are never in over supply. The language that you use to encourage your sales staff is part of what will keep them motivated and enjoying their work. When people enjoy their work, they become committed to your company's goals and bottom line.

In a sales team, it is important for the hot dogs to feel like you are in the pit with them, working hard like they are, concerned about what concerns them and generally looking out for them. To communicate this level of involvement and team playing, you must stay involved with your team. It helps to have an open-door policy that invites the team members to come to you anytime with their concerns. Otherwise, you can seem aloof and unapproachable to them – not a team message. Keep an open mind with your team members and regularly call meetings – once a week, once a month, whatever is needed. Pump them up with kudos and small rewards and let them know that you're paying attention to their hard work.

Incentives and rewards do not have to be large amounts of money or high dollar items. But they are important to use in letting your team know that you recognize their hard work and appreciate them. Some of the best incentives are the most personal ones. For instance, during my days at AmEx some of the best incentives I received were the ones that made a difference for my family – box seats at the hockey games and baseball games. The box seats were $200 each and I could not have afforded to take us all to the games at that time. The company executives had purchased a box for the season just to entertain business interests and to reward their top salespeople.

Sometimes the rewards are even smaller or they are for the entire team – great for team building. A friend once told me that her best boss at AT&T rewarded the entire team for exceeding their monthly numbers by bringing in her most fattening, best tasting, home-made banana pudding for the entire group. Similarly, our banking group at Citibank regularly rewarded the accounting group for crunching out the numbers on time each month with a monthly departmental cake and ice cream afternoon – always in the last hour of a Friday.

Rewards have a way of keeping people's spirits up and helping your sales team to feel like their hard work does not go unnoticed or unappreciated. Some of the incentives help to create a regular time of camaraderie among team members which helps keep tensions down and cooperation up.

I once worked for a man who sent me to training once a month along with the other managers in the company, but we would literally sleep through the class after about the first six classes because the company used the same instructor week after week. It wasn't really the instructor's fault; he was doing his best. But the fact is that salespeople have an insatiable need to learn new things and they get bored easily. Before the days of the psychological diagnosis of ADD [Attention Deficit Disorder], companies just dealt with the reality of a common short attention span amongst their sales teams.

The need for new information and the fact of getting bored easily does not make your team member ADD, it just makes them a normal salesperson. There is an advantage to this psychological profile and it benefits your company to have a staff of people who need to move on to the next thing so they don't get bored. This characteristic helps to move people along the sales process. I would even go so far as to say that if your sales staff does not have a certain amount of unrest in their souls, then they will likely not be top producers.

The key to successful and regular sales training is to keep it mixed up for the team so they stay interested and engaged. If you need to have different presenters each week or each month, then go the extra mile to get different people in. If you need to spice up the training or upgrade the training, then consider a group seminar or professional course.

Diversity always helps your sales team to be sharp and successful. Consider that you will want to be able to serve every segment of the population that purchases your product or service. The best way to appeal to any segment of the population is to have someone on staff that looks like them.