Hi, Jim Pancero, helping you become a stronger leader of your sales team. Are your sales contests achieving all of your goals? There are four overall goals of any contest that we're hoping are achieved by a sales team to generate the most impact and the most increased profitability.
The first goal of any contest is we want to make sure it focuses or redirects behaviors. That's one of the main reasons sales contests are held. So you have a new product line, or you have a product line that is being underperformed, this is a great time to put energy and excitement and some extra dollars behind it, to see if we can increase the efforts that are put into that specific product line, to help increase sales long-term.
But the second goal of any contest is really independent of what the focus of the contest is, what products or services it's promoting. But the second goal of a contest is just to generate excitement and energy within the team. The idea of generating energy and excitement so that it impacts all of what they're doing. Look how repetitive a sales territory is. They're selling the same products, every week, to the same customers. So one of the goals of a contest is just a distraction for the sales team, to be able to help fire up the energy and to kind of break the monotony of what goes on.
The third goal we're hoping of any sales contest is it helps develop the skills of your salespeople because of your coaching through the contest. For focusing on new behaviors, it's a great time to coach and improve the skills of your people in those behaviors that you're trying to accelerate because of the contest that you're holding.
The fourth and final idea is, the contest is supposed to increase sales. So the question is, is your contest helping you achieve more than you would have achieved if you had no contest at all? Too many times our contest are not having the impact we want to because we're not achieving all four goals in the programs that we're doing.
In a future video, I'll cover some ideas of how you can improve your contests but for now I just ask you, are you hitting all the goals you want to with the contest that you're holding? And what can you do to change it up, so you can hopefully have a bigger payoff and more impact when you do hold contests in the future?
I'd love to know what you're doing about this. Love to know how you've improved your contests. I'm posting two new podcasts each week, all aimed at helping you and your team increase your selling competitive advantage.