Managing sales teams successfully has always presented a number of challenges. Keeping your teams enthusiastic and motivated has always been the key, especially when you have to bring new products into the mix, ensuring that sales staff are knowledgeable and confident. You may also be working with the staff of your partners and resellers to help them understand your product and service range well enough to sell them effectively. I believe one of the answers to these challenges is Incentivisation.
Incentivisation differs from standard commission plans in a number of different ways. Commission is the hard earned cash for sales success but, for the average sales person, commission earned tends to go straight into their bank account and straight out again to pay the mortgage and other living costs. The point is that, except for the lucky few, commission is the norm, unremarkable…just another part of earning the wage. Breaking this cycle can be tough, however Incentivisation offers that opportunity to reward in a way that is both special and memorable.
So how does it work?
Incentivisation should sit alongside commission but be seen as separate and, whereas commission is paid for the day-to-day sales success, incentivisation rewards for other types of achievement, as well as sales. And the key word here is “Reward”. Rewards need to be special, tangible, non-cash items that can be earned outside of the normal sales environment. Why does it work? Well it’s because they are memorable. Who remembers the £250 commission cheque that went to pay off part of the credit card bill? But everyone remembers the one-off incentives reward that gave them a very special treat.
Rewarding achievement should ber the goal of incentivisation and to do this you need to create campaigns targeting specific areas of performance and behaviour that need improvement. Incentive campaigns can be aimed at particular teams or groups of staff, and different roles or grades can be given different challenges and different rewards.
Three key stages to a successful Incentive campaign:
- Create opportunities for staff to achieve
- Monitor staff performance and award reward points for achievement
- Provide staff with the ability to spend their reward points on something exciting
In our organisation, we call this process Realise, Recognise, Reward.
Three scenarios:
Marketing
Marketing wants to introduce a new product range into the mix and needs to educate the sales team with it for selling alongside their current products. Commissioning for sales of a new product on top of an existing mix can create all sorts of challenges, so creating an incentive campaign to reward staff for learning about the new product and how to sell it helps to motivate the sales team to embrace the new product. This gives sales staff the knowledge and confidence to sell the new product, and reinforcing the new product with incentives keeps it fresh in their minds.
Customer services
Outbound customer services team seems to be struggling when dealing with customer objections. An incentive campaign can be created to: educate about the correct handling of objections; reward for participating in the learning; test staff to measure improvement; reward staff for getting the correct answers; and finally, report and monitor ongoing performance rewarding staff as their results improve.
Partners and resellers
Your partners and resellers are not giving your products priority when dealing with customers, even though commission plans are in place to remunerate partners for sales performance. An incentive campaign can be set up to specifically target the staff of resellers and partners to raise product awareness and to encourage them to sell more by rewarding directly for sales achievement.
So what makes incentivisation schemes work?
For senior management, you need a robust and auditable system that makes return on investment clear, demonstrating budget going in at one end to service the scheme and supply the rewards, followed by improved performance and increased sales coming out at the other end. A good incentivisation framework will be transparent, making the performance of each campaign visible.
Operational management needs to reward staff in a clear and tangible way and see who is earning and, equally importantly, who is not. Giving opportunity to earn rewards needs to be straightforward. It shouldn’t interfere with day-to-day work, and it should be easy to create and launch campaigns, as well as monitor and report on them.
From the perspective of staff, they need clear goals, how to achieve these goals and know what they can earn. For staff, the incentive system needs to have two key elements: a points bank in the style of a normal bank account, where they can see what points they have earned and how to spend their points; and an online shop where they can spend the points they have earned. An effective incentive system should always provide both of these elements.
Central to the scheme are the rewards. Organisations should create catalogues made from a mix of rewards that reflect the culture and style of the organisation. They may want to create multiple reward catalogues so that specific rewards can be made available to different groups. If reward delivery is high profile, then staff can see who is receiving them and this further motivates others to participate in the scheme.
Rewards can take many forms
Here are a few examples:
- Gift items
- High street vouchers
- Vouchers for experience days
- Additional annual leave, flexi-time credits or other organisational benefits
- Vouchers for further education, training, childcare etc.
Conclusion
Targeted incentivisation can be used in addition to commission helping Sales Managers raise the game of their sales staff in fun and engaging ways. Incentive campaigns can address specific challenges that would be difficult through standard methods, and they have the flexibility to be tailored to appeal to specific groups or teams. Above all, incentivisation is a highly cost-effective and enjoyable way of improving sales performance, from which everyone in the organisation can benefit. Finally you need to make the return on investment work, only build a scheme that works with reaching your targets and kpi’s then everyone gets something from the scheme.
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