Getting the most from your prospectors is no easy task. Technical issues, decaying lists, and poor talk tracks can all derail even the most talented prospecting team. But by far the most daunting obstacle is motivation. Keeping your prospectors eager to make dozens or hundreds of dials a day is difficult, and fighting this force can seem like an uphill battle.

But there are a few ways to keep your prospectors’ activity totals up.

1. Contests

Incentivizing your prospectors through the regular use of contests and rewards is one of the easiest ways to boost their activity totals.

Not all contests are created equal, though, and it is important to find the right balance of team vs. individual and short-term vs. long-term contests to keep production high. Quarterly team dinners are a great way to recognize persistent effort, and performance-based prizes help goad reps on to even higher levels of production, but it is also important to reward smaller accomplishments.

Spiffs are a great way to do this. These small rewards — doled out for everything from scheduling the most opportunities in a given week to writing the best prospecting email — encourage your reps to stay persistent and energetic on a daily level. Spiffs don’t need to be big — a shiny new gadget or nice bottle of wine will do — but they should be given routinely.

2. Tools

Sometimes the best way to motivate your reps is to give them tools to make their jobs easier. Power dialers, prospecting tools, and improved analytics can all help your outbound reps better ply their trade by making that trade just a little easier. Nothing saps motivation like an unnecessarily difficult task, so give your prospectors the best chance to succeed by arming them with the right tools for the job.

3. Transparency

Perhaps the best way to get your reps to improve their activity totals, though, is simply to display them. When your reps can easily see exactly how they’re performing — and how the other members of their team are performing — they will naturally want to improve their performance.

Did you make more dials than your neighbor? Did you book more meetings than last month’s top performer? Allowing your reps to easily answer these questions by giving them access to performance metrics will ensure that your reps are performing at their highest level and pushing their teammates to that same level of achievement.

The image above show exactly how many dials, connects, meetings, demos, opportunities and deals your prospectors generated. Displaying this or sending it to them in a nightly or weekly email will help your reps perform more activities every day and ensure that they are generating as much pipeline for your sales team as possible.

This is just one example of how measuring your prospecting team can lead to improved results. For a lot more, download our FREE new eBook on the topic.