Your sales team is your lifeblood - without it, you would have no customers and ultimately no money. Here's 4 issues that incentives can help fix.
Your sales department is your company's lifeblood. Without it, you'd have no customers, no new business, and ultimately no money. So it's important that your sales team is able to perform to the best of their abilities.
However, often sales departments can be taxing places to work - even the best reps will get told no sometimes, and that feeling of rejection can be difficult to cope with, leading to unhappy and disengaged employees.
You might be surprised to find that many of the most common issues your sales team faces can be solved with a Sales Incentive Programme. Here's how.
1) Lack of motivation
Lack of motivation tends to be caused when individuals in a sales team aren't personally invested in their own success. This is often due to a poorly planned rewards or compensation scheme where only the top performers end up receiving their bonuses, leaving those in the middle out in the cold.
When someone starts to believe their rewards are out of reach, they will simply stop trying to achieve them, and sales figures will drop as a result. If they perceive the system to be unfairly weighted towards certain people, this will also have an effect on motivation. For example, if a sales rep looks after the company's core market, and therefore gets a lot of repeat business, they will always win against someone who is trying to enter a new market. This is despite the fact, if successful, the new market could bring in extra profit.
So, it's important that you work out a sales incentive programme that rewards everyone, not just your top performers. This doesn't have to be in the form of a monetary bonus. Incentives such as electronics or household appliances will be highly appreciated, especially if the individual has been able to choose their own prize. Power2Motivate's Global Rewards Gallery, for example, has thousands of different items on offer, including travel and event tickets!
2) Lack of progression
The feeling that there is no way to progress often leads to poor motivation. Introducing different levels of incentives is a good way to overcome this. Lower performers or new employees will get the chance to receive smaller prizes for easier to achieve KPIs - things like booking meetings.
Once they feel the power of being rewarded, this will often motivate them to try for the harder prizes, such as those that reward closing deals. This will show a clear path for progress among your sales reps right from the beginning, and they'll tangibly be able to see the effects of their progress as they begin to receive higher ticket items.
3) Poor culture
When people aren't hitting target, it's easy for sales culture to suffer. If the team doesn't feel like they're achieving anything this will often lead to high turnover - another big problem for sales departments. For example, average turnover for sales stands at around 14-16 per cent, according to Radford, compared to 12 to 13 per cent for the overall employee population.
Prizes will incentivise sales people to work hard and achieve their KPIs - once people start hitting target, the positive culture will follow. People will be less likely to leave, as they'll feel that their work is appreciated.
4) Going after the wrong deals
Sometimes sales people could be trying very hard, but they're just going after the wrong types of deal, ones that won't benefit your company. Introducing an incentives scheme that only rewards the kind of behaviour you want to see will encourage your sales team to get on the right track, as they'll know which types of customers and sales techniques the company wants to encourage.
Power2Motivate UK has years of experience introducing sales incentive programmes that work. For more information on any of our rewards schemes, contact the team today.