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With the Winter Games underway, olympic sports are on everyone’s mind, and as a sales manager, you may be feeling the stress of keeping your reps focused. However, in reality, you should welcome these exciting seasonal events. They provide the opportunity to introduce new contests and incentives into your sales environment. So embrace the distraction, and turn it into more sales.
Any event your reps are interested in can be leveraged to help increase their drive and spur sales. Significant competitive events like the Winter Games work especially well. Integrating your sales reps’ performance with the athletes’ performance will build on the excitement they already had about the event and aim that extra motivation right at their work performance.
The Detroit Pistons sales team used this tactic during the 2012 Games. They ran an Olympic-themed, team-based competition, which included assigning sales teams to countries. The teams were awarded points whenever an “athlete” (the sales rep) from their “country” (their sales team) hit a desired quota on closing sales. This way, the reps got points for their own performance and rooted for team members along the way. The reps also earned points when actual Olympic athletes from their assigned country won events at the live games.
The goal of the contest was to create some energy at a historically slow time of year for ticket sales, but this smartly designed program added a nice dose of excitement within the sales team, and resulted in an 18% sales increase compared to the same period the year before. Competition was the difference.
Alternatively, with any distracting event, offer a one-hour express contest around something like cold calls that ends right before that big event starts. Many of our clients call these “power hours” and it can make a big difference A quick, intense competition for the last hour of the day will keep reps productive and talking about important sales activities, rather than whose bets are where.
You can easily spice up existing sales contests by offering event-themed incentives, too. Leveraging any much-anticipated big game or event is a great way to make sure your reps keep their eyes on the prize (literally).
Try offering a game-watching party for the sales team that closes the most deals on game day, or giving away new game gear to the rep who books the most meetings in the week before. You can even offer a pair of tickets to the big game to the reps that hit their quarterly goal first. Take whatever event they’re excited to watch and make it even more exciting.
It can sometimes feel like the push to sell is never ending – you’ve either just started a quarter and are trying to get off on the right foot, in the middle of a quarter and struggling to maintain team productivity or about to wrap one up and making final efforts to hit your goals. By taking big events that would otherwise be distractions and incorporating them into your sales contest and incentive themes, you can break up the long sales push and keep your reps refreshed, motivated and focused.
Bob Marsh is CEO of LevelEleven, a sales gamification and CRM solutions company, with the #1 most popular gamification app on the Salesforce AppExhange: Compete. Bob has almost 20-years experience in sales management. Follow Bob on Twitter @BobMarsh5.
Learn more tips to motivate your sales reps both on and off season with the free Salesforce e-book below.
