5 Ways to Create Performance Increasing Sales Competitions
Stuck running the same boring sales competitions with little results? Let old habits win again, OR try out some of our tips for creating better contests that actually increase performance.
Salespeople are competitive by nature, so it’s no wonder that contests are an effective way to motivate them to improve their performance. However, not all sales contests are created equal and running the same standard ones time and again is frustrating and demotivating for many salespeople. Variety, meaningful rewards and visualizing progress are all important aspects of creating competitions that engage your employees and result in performance increases.
So, here are 5 simple tips for better sales competitions.
1. Make it a Lottery
One of the great things about lottery competitions is that everyone gets a chance to succeed. The more tickets you have, the higher the probability of winning, so good performance is still rewarded–however, those that are not generally top performers still have incentive to participate.
Adding some randomness to your sales competitions changes it up and ensures that the same few people aren’t always getting the top spot–which leads to higher employee engagement, less frustration and a friendlier competitive environment.
Example: 1 lottery ticket per each customer support chat closed during the course of a week. Spin to win at the end of the week, more tickets give you a higher chance of winning. Want to learn more about setting up a Lottery competition? Check out our tutorial!
2. Use Personal Milestones
Basing some of your contests on personal milestones helps to equal the playing field. Each individual rep might reach different milestones at different times, so altering contests to reflect this ensures that everyone has an opportunity to win–even when they are not the top sales rep.
Example: anyone that reaches X amount of sales in a month or X number of cold calls in a week.
3. Give Kickass Rewards
To further incentivize your teams to increase performance, try adding prizes for the winner(s). It’s important to ask people what they want to see in a rewards shop, otherwise, it will be completely meaningless to them. For example, if Leslie doesn’t drink wine and the prize for winning the contest is a bottle of wine, she will likely have no motivation to perform.
So, customize rewards based on your own employees and remember that it’s about more than just money. Oftentimes, more experience-based rewards such as getting to leave early on a Friday or lunch with the boss are way more meaningful. One of our personal favorites at SalesScreen is doling out push-ups to another co-worker during the Friday meeting.
Example: Top 3 individuals with the most total meetings booked at the end of the month. Need some awesome prize ideas? Here’s 101 Meaningful Employee Rewards ideas!
4. Create a Sense of Urgency
As a successful organization, it is important to have both short and long-term goals; however, when it comes to office contests, it is more motivating to set tangible, short-term goals. And with millennials coming up in the workforce–they will account for around 75% of the global workforce by 2025–instant and ongoing feedback is key. Thus, running frequent competitions is useful for improving sales performance as well as providing a form of feedback for your millennial (and all other) employees.
Time-based competitions are also an excellent way to build a sense of urgency and push your reps to perform to their fullest potential. Try out daily, weekly and monthly sales competitions to see what fits best for your organization–and for specific metrics.
Example: 1 point for each qualifying activity (emails, phone calls, CRM entries, etc) completed in 1 week.
5. Show Progress
A study by the Harvard Business Review revealed that the best performing sales teams had two major things in common–one of which was ”holding their team members to a higher level of accountability.”
Part of holding reps accountable for their results is visualizing progress in real-time via screens throughout the office. This establishes a level of transparency amongst employees, where everyone is both responsible for their own performance and aware of their colleagues’ performance. According to a recent study, “managers are 11% more likely to have a clear idea of how their company is performing than regular employees”; so improving transparency for employees is a great opportunity to increase engagement and productivity. When employees “understand how their impact drives the success of the business overall” they “are much more likely to know how to optimize that impact.”
Similarly, people should know where they stand, so they can adjust their behavior accordingly. If someone is lagging behind, they will get an extra boost to see who is ahead of them and strive to move up in the ranks. Similarly, if someone is in the lead they will want to fight to keep the winning position. Competitive spirit ignited.
Example: 1 point per meeting booked during the course of 2 weeks. Each point gets you closer to your goal (i.e. building a cabin). Show progress via screens throughout your office(s) to inspire action.
Do you have suggestions for brilliant sales competitions? Send them our way to marketing@salesscreen.com
And if you want to know more about how SalesScreen facilitates sales competitions, feel free to drop us a line at marketing@salesscreen.com
Originally published at www.salesscreen.com.
