Your sales staff is a key ingredient to your company’s success. Keeping them motivated with great incentives will lead them to do their best work and result in more orders for your business. Here are seven great ways to get your staff engaged and motivated for success.
1. Financial Rewards
There are many different ways to go about offering monetary rewards to your sales team. Set goals for them to earn sales bonuses by reaching certain milestones. You can set an overall set of standards for all salespeople or set individual objectives to allow them to break their own previous records. A tiered reward system is also very motivating. In this system, bonuses would occur for each level of sales that is reached, allowing them to maximize their rewards by working their way up the sales ladder.
2. Contests
Competition can be an excellent motivator in a sales environment. Create a contest in which your team competes to get to the highest sales level. Often employees will be motivated simply by earning the title of winner. However, if you choose a high-quality prize to go along with the win, you’ll likely get even better results for your contest. If you have a very large sales team, you can choose a few winners or break them into groups that they will compete in. Be sure to update all competitors often throughout the competition so they know where they stand. You could even create a graph or chart that gets updated daily to show your staff the most current sales levels in the contest.
3. Extra Education
Rewarding high performers with additional opportunities to learn will keep them engaged and drive them to continue on their path to success. There are a variety of ways to offer additional learning opportunities. You could offer a training session with a professional coach from renowned sources like Online Profit Project or a workshop for a group that meets a specific goal, or tickets to a high-demand sales conference or industry event. Not only will this opportunity be an incentive to your employees, additional education for your sales staff will likely also lead to even higher sales for your business. For a little bit more fun, you could also offer some education not related to their role. Your team may enjoy classes on other fun topics like cooking or winemaking.
4. Time Off
Most employees really look forward to enjoying their paid time off. Spending time vacationing or with family and friends is refreshing and important to their work-life balance. Offering up additional vacation hours or days for meeting specific goals will give your team something to work toward that is very valuable to them. There are few things more motivating than being paid to relax, so this can be a great way to get your team moving towards meeting higher and higher goals.
5. Recognition
Recognition for a job well done is something that many employees find lacking. If your employees are constantly working at a high level and no one is noticing, they will slowly lose their motivation. There are many ways to show your employees that you see and value the work they do. You should regularly call attention to outstanding work so that your sales team will want to work towards obtaining that recognition. It could be as simple as an email to the team highlighting a particular team member’s accomplishment. You could also invest in a plaque for a big milestone, like the highest sales in a year. Whatever you choose, be sure to regularly reassure your team that you are paying attention and appreciating their hard work.
6. Prizes
An investment in a few high-value prizes can result in a much larger influx of sales. Choose popular items that are in demand and offer them up as prizes for meeting certain metrics. Consider things like gaming systems, laptops, or even high-dollar gift cards. These items should be reserved for the top sales tiers to get your staff striving to do their very best. You can also have lower-level prizes that they can earn along the way.
7. Event Tickets
Tickets to a nearby event could get your team feeling really competitive. Look for popular events such as concerts and sports games. If you can swing tickets that are difficult to get, or special additions such as a backstage pass or tour of the stadium this will up the ante even further. You can even include a bonus like a limo ride to the event to get your employees really excited to win.
Giving your employees something fun or valuable to strive for will help keep them on track to meeting goals. Whether competing with their team or with their own past performance, incentives will lead to your salespeople exceeding your expectations. Get your staff on track to win by offering some of these great incentives.
