Sales contests are an important component of your motivational efforts to help your team sell even more. Join me as I share five ways you can strengthen the impact and motivation of your sales contests…so your team can sell even more!
Sales contests are an important component of your motivational efforts to help your team sell even more. Join me as I share five ways you can strengthen the impact and motivation of your sales contests…so your team can sell even more!
Hi, Jim Pancero, helping you become a stronger leader of your sales team. In our first video this week, we talked about the goals of a sales contest and hopefully how you can achieve all of those goals within the contest you hold for your team. On this video, the second video this week, I'd like to focus and talk about what are ways you could actually strengthen or improve the contest that you hold for your sales team. The first suggestion is we want to make sure the best contests are the ones that avoid single winners. The worst contest you can hold is a Salesperson of the Year contest or the first person that sells so many units gets an award. The reason that's a problem is you have maybe some very senior people in some mid-range and some junior people on your sales team. If all you do is have single winner contest, it's pretty predictable the top one or two people in your team are going to win everything. And it's actually going to demotivate your team instead of adding energy and excitement to what they're doing.
So we want to make sure that each individual is not in competition with the other members of your sales team, but they're in competition with themselves. The idea that if somebody doesn't win the contest, nobody got there first. Nobody took it away from them. There's nobody that outsold them sooner because they had more years of experience. The only problem we have here is you left money on the table because you didn't achieve the increase that we were asking. With coaching, would you let me help you? I think we can achieve more next time if you let me be of help. It's a great coaching opportunity for this. That's why we don't want single winners.
The second thing is we'll make sure we change the contest up. You can't have a predictable contest and it's still have energy and excitement and impact on the team. The worst contest you can hold are ones where every September you have the same contest for the same products. You'll have people in June start selling for that contest and hiding their orders just to make sure that they have a strong showing when the contest starts. They're going to outsmart the whole goal of the contest if they know it's coming. So we're going to keep changing the contest up and make sure it's not predictable with the team. This also allows you to focus on a variety of things. It might be your most senior people, their highest volumes of sales with the accounts they have, but your junior ones would have winning opportunities if you had how many new prospects were open for the month. The idea is you want to keep changing it up so we keep giving attention to different areas to spread the excitement and energy across the entire sales team.
The third suggestion is make sure your contest focuses on results and not efforts. I've seen a lot of contests that meant well, but they were focusing on efforts. The person that makes the most new business prospecting calls this month gets an award. Well, the person was making, spending all time making calls, but they didn't really care what was said because that wasn't the goal of the contest. We need to make sure our contest focuses on our results of what we're trying to achieve, not just the efforts of how we start to get there.
The fourth suggestion is you want to keep your contest short. The best contest length seemed to be about three to six months. That gives your sales reps enough time to change behaviors and start to see a pay off from those changed behaviors towards the contest win without it getting boring or monotonous or just disappearing for months because the sales reps hadn't thought about it.
And the fifth and final suggestion is a sales contest is meant to generate energy and excitement within your team. So that means that if somebody didn't win the contest, this is major coaching opportunity for you as a manager. This is where you can go to them and say, "You left money on the table. Would you let me help you?" You want to make sure they understand that the contest was there for their performance, and nobody took it away from them. So it's an opportunity to improve their behaviors and their skills so next time they can make more money
Sales contests can be a very impactful and effective tool for your sales team, but we've got to make sure they're applied properly so they can offer you the maximum payoff for you and your team. We'd love to know what you're doing with your contest. Would love to know how they've improved. Would love to be of help if I can answer any questions. I'm posting two new podcasts each week, all aimed at helping you and your team increase your selling competitive advantage.