As a sales leader, there’s no better feeling than bringing out the best in your team. No matter if your salespeople consistently perform, or if they need a spark, a good manager will ultimately always find a way to drive performance.
However, this can be far easier in theory than in practice. How do you get a team that performs well to earn even better results? How do you get your people to rally after consecutive under-performing quarters?
Think about the times you’ve been involved in a winning sales culture. What were the best parts about it? Odds are, they had some or all of these components:
- People felt eager to pursue new leads.
- It always felt like there was a new goal to aspire towards.
- People felt properly motivated to achieve those goals.
It All Starts with a Sales Contest
Your sales culture can get the jolt it needs when you truly invest in your salespeople and decide to break the status quo. There’s no better jumping-off point for this than creating a sales contest. Throw out commission caps, year-to-date sales, and any office politics standing in your way, and give your team a level playing field where they all have the chance to shine.
Contests are an excellent way to spur sales within your team, inspire healthy competition, and help your people realize a potential they thought they would never reach. When your sales team is the lifeblood of the company, you need to do everything in your power to make your department thrive.
If you’re looking to breathe new life into your sales culture and create engagement beyond belief, a well-managed contest can serve as a catalyst for larger successes to come.
The ROI will Always be There
If sales leaders and upper management dedicate the resources needed to keep their team motivated, they will always get a return on investment. Even in companies with great commission structures and perks, your sales team may sometimes get complacent. When this is evident, you need to shake things up.
When you initiate a sales contest and put a worthy prize on the line, you allow your team to chase a new dream and create a new standard in the process. While your team members may be excited about their upcoming commission check, they largely know what to expect. If they win a contest for a $1000 resort gift card, their imagination can run wild about where they’ll use it.
According to BI Worldwide, more experience-based prizes draw more emotional engagement and are considered more of a memorable reward, but feel free to pick whatever is best for your company. As long as the prize is truly enticing, you should expect some kind of uptick in results.
If you announce your prize and don’t feel palpable enthusiasm and notice an uptick in sales activity, don’t be afraid to go back to the drawing board.
Incentivize and Grow
Another inherent value of running a sales contest is that it can inspire belief from those in your team who may need it most. The reps who are cold, the reps who have the least sales year-to-date, and the reps who are flat-out bored will feel compelled to win for themselves and win for the company when the stakes suddenly feel more important.
Contests are something everyone can get behind. While everyone can’t win, the shared experience of chasing the prize can bring your team close together. As sales leaders, it is your job to facilitate that sense of community and rally around the fact that all of the fruits of your team’s labor from this contest are going towards one common goal.
When sales leaders run fair, transparent contests where your team can easily track the results, your team will feel the cohesion that comes with healthy competition, and you can inspire positive behavior changes in any of your reps. A properly run sales contest can be the elegant solution and the paradigm shift that changes everything in a relatively short amount of time while leaving a lasting impact.
Short-Term Solution? We Beg to Differ
Some may consider contests as a short-term solution meant as a desperate attempt to inflate numbers or rescue a fiscal quarter, but they offer so much more than that. When sales leaders present these opportunities with a worthwhile incentive in a positive light, they can learn so much more about their sales force and what drives them.
If one of your weakest sales performers rises to the top, they may suddenly feel more comfortable in their role and actively try harder to sustain the results. If your turnover rate reduces over a calendar year, it can be attributed to the fact that your salespeople are stimulated and feel that they’re being properly rewarded for their hard work.
No matter how well things are going for your sales force, consider creating a sales contest to see the impact it makes. Suddenly, progress will feel more tangible, wins will be celebrated more, and you’ll uncover a blueprint to continually hit your sales goals.
Are You Running Your Contests the Right Way?
If you’re considering running a sales contest, how you facilitate it will make all the difference. Are you simply giving a daily update and pointing towards a dry-erase board? If so, you run the risk of enthusiasm running out very quickly and the results being largely ineffective. It’s of the utmost importance to run contests with an emphasis on growth. You need to give performers of all levels on your sales team something to aspire to. Even if they don’t win, if your salespeople enjoy the process and recognize the strides they made, you will see positive indicators of what’s to come.
With Goals.com, you and your sales team can easily establish and track sales goals, and create interactive sales contests in minutes. Curious to see it in action? Sign up for a 30-day free trial or schedule a demo today.