It’s only natural for sales leadership to look for ways to inspire sales people to rise to the cause. There’s never any shortage of “causes” it seems. It can be a month end, year end, too much inventory, or a new product launch, to name just some of the examples where management feels the need to provide extra incentive to produce extra momentum.
The inspiration for this blog comes from a not so unusual conversation I had with a client recently.
An EVP of Sales, she spoke of her frustration in generating support from her sales team to deliver on a certain initiative. In this case, there was an up coming event that the company was presenting and their need for the sales team to invite clients to attend. Essentially, she needed the sales team to personally reach out to clients and secure their attendance.
A week went by, then a month, and more, until the event was just weeks away. At this point, there still weren’t anywhere near enough guests on board. Of those guest that had confirmed, they had been invited by employees other than the sales team.
So what did she do? She created a contest. The rep with the most guests would receive an additional incentive, beyond what was called for in their existing comp plan. It worked, just, and the event was a success, not withstanding the stress and pressure of rallying participants at the last minute.
As I said, this isn’t unusual. In my experience, I see many sales organizations repeatedly conjuring new and different approaches to inspire sales people to do what they should be expected to do anyway, what they have actually committed to do in the past, and what most likely is an existing part of their terms of employment.
This isn’t to say that from time to time, and I mean occasionally, that an added incentive isn’t appropriate. Sadly though, they tend to be the ubiquitous and the constant attempted solution, addressing a problem that shouldn’t exist in the first place. Let me explain.
There are numerous problems that are endemic to the use of “spiffs” or contests for a sales force:
1) Go back to the job description. Most of the functions or performance expectations – that management feels the need to add further incentive to – are or should already be provided for in the sales person’s compensation package.
2) Generally speaking, contests or promotions tend to catch the interest of the same group of sales people, and those are usually the individuals who are already outperforming the rest. They don’t need the extra nudge.
3) If you reflect back, you’ll recognize that as in point “2”, the very people you’re most challenged with around performance issues are the same people that never show up in the contests, let alone win.
4) Constant use of contests, or additional promotion, like too much of anything in life, eventually lose their novelty. What this creates is a circumstance where the contest or promotion has to offer larger and larger rewards to gain any traction.
5) Overuse of contests creates expectations. Eventually, sales people wait for and, expect the spiff before they give it their all.
6) If you are going to do a contest, remember that not all – and you would be surprised by how few – sales people are actually motivated by money. Yes, I know this sounds hard to believe, but it’s true.
Soft rewards, like a recognition dinner with a senior executive including spouses, or the chance for the winner (or winners) to attend a special event or attraction with their favorite client can deliver substantially greater attention because the only thing more powerful than money is recognition.
Bottom line? Over use of contests and promotions to incent sales people to do what they should already be doing, often leads to complacently, and worse, expectation.
Sales people need to be motivated and rewarded for their contribution to the success of the organization. They need to have reasonable goals, and then be responsible for them.
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