As the head of you company’s sales department, you’ve probably already created a career in sales and marketing for yourself. You know how to work with a good recruitment agency, you know how to hire sales people, and you’re always able to hand out career advice to anyone hoping to make a successful career in sales. But hiring sales people is just the first step — now you need to figure out how to keep those employees motivated and enthusiastic.

In your quest to find the best employees and create great motivational techniques (probably involving money) for keeping them, you may be overlooking a few ways that you’re demotivating employees. So let’s take a look at a few:

1. Creating unrealistic deadlines and goals. You want to help your employees succeed in a sales career, and there’s no faster way to make them self-conscious than to constantly let them know that they’re not good enough. We aren’t saying that you should erase requirements altogether, but if multiple employees are having trouble making certain goals, then you may need to re-evaluate your expectations. If they know they won’t be able to succeed no matter how hard they try, they probably won’t try very hard.

2. Not giving enough public compliments, and giving too many public criticisms. Someone can only create a career in sales by connecting with other people, and his/her reputation is incredibly important here. If you force a bad reputation on your employees without giving them a chance to correct wrong behavior quietly, you’ll only create an environment where none of your employees feel comfortable.

3. Not encouraging and applauding creativity. If someone’s able to create a career in sales and becomes extremely successful, they’ve probably been known to take a few risks and make some crazy suggestions every now and then. Sales people are creative to their core — they have to be — and you’ll only encourage frustration if you don’t welcome their new ideas.

And now it’s time to be honest with yourself: are any of these practices present in your workplace? Can you think of any other practices that might be demotivating your employees?