Enhancing your sales success
Enhancing your sales success
What motivates sales reps? What can you do to boost your sales team? Sales reps are eager to be the best in the business. They demand attention and like to be recognized for their vigorous efforts. Clients with sales issues face the same challenge every day: How can they motivate the sales teams to sell more? Businesses may choose to offer incentives to their sales teams to keep them hungry for more.
Here are some ideas on incentives:
- Contests. Most salespeople are competitive by nature. Contests are great ways to motivate salespeople to strive harder to achieve success.
- Daily/Weekly Cash Incentives. A cash incentive might be the boost you need for your sales reps. It can be based on the number of leads/appointments made that week, the highest dollar amount of sales, the one who closed the most business or maybe the amount of hours worked.
- Giveaways. Trips or vacation packages are very nice incentives for teams with long-term sales goals. Another type of giveaway could be personal days off, free lunch or family dinner of their choice, or housecleaning and a spa day for relaxation.
- Gift cards. New programs out there offer incentive programs for business to give staff members or loyal customer’s gift cards for products or services. Programs such as these offer choices to the person being rewarded. They can choose from a catalog or choose several locations to get their prizes.
Motivating sales people is more about knowing your sales team. Once you get to know your team on a professional and a personal level you will learn that only a fraction of your crew are truly self-starters who will always surpass quota. The big challenge is getting the slower performers involved in the sales game while giving attention to the superstars who drive your bottom line.
Here are a few tips on developing a successful sales incentive plan:
- Make the program simple. Salespeople have enough details in their daily work to track without having to spend time working out a complicated incentive plan.
- Deliver what you promise. Get your cash or product incentives in line before you announce the program.
- Sales programs are designed to designate winners and losers, but the best successes come from teamwork. Combining point systems can be a big motivator when the big sale is in the bag; then all involved gets a bit of the credit and the reward.
Top sales performers are usually internally motivated, success oriented and focused. When you hire the right salespeople and provide them with a good compensation plan that rewards results, it will not be necessary to offer a lot of sales incentives and contests to motivate your sales team.
