Your sales reps know they can increase their earnings through bonuses and commissions, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to continuously increasing sales. Monetary motivation only goes so far. After a while, the same expected rewards lose their power, and your sales team loses its drive.
It isn’t always obvious that your sales team is suffering from a lack of engagement. The personality of sales professionals tends to be bright and bubbly in all circumstances, so you might not notice a change in attitude or behavior as is common with other types of workers. Instead, a disengaged, low-energy sales team is best identified by consistently missed targets or stagnant or dipping sales numbers.
The best way to combat disengagement from your sales team is with intentional incentivization. The right employee incentive programs can significantly benefit your sales department by boosting productivity (which typically results in higher sales figures to support business growth), and by improving employee morale (which means happier, healthier workers). Plus, offering diverse incentive programs can make it easier for you to understand how individual members of your team tick, so you can adjust your leadership style to meet their needs and drive their performance to new heights.
If you are struggling to develop creative and impactful incentive programs, consider the following ideas for engaging and energizing your sales team:
Peer-to-Peer Recognition
Sales is a competitive environment, and constant competition with coworkers can be draining. To discourage antagonism and increase cooperation, you might institute a peer-to-peer recognition program in which employees are encouraged to express appreciation for one another publicly. Because your team members spend ample time with one another, they are best equipped to identify individual workers’ strengths. There are a few different ways to organize peer-to-peer recognition, such as:
- Creating a gratitude wall where employees can post messages about one another.
- Scheduling time during meetings for employees to recognize one another.
- Allowing employees to post about one another on shared platforms.
Gamification
All work and no play makes your sales team tired and disengaged. While additional paid time off is a common incentive, giving your sales workers too much play time could also negatively impact performance. Instead, you should find a way to make their work fun, like through gamification.
Gamification is the process of adding interactivity and collectibles – like points, badges and leaderboards – to non-gaming situations like sales. Because sales professionals already have competitive drives, most will take to gamification programs rapidly. You might try to develop programs based on your team’s favorite games, changing the theme regularly to maintain interest.
Professional Development
Few salespeople want to remain on the floor for the entirety of their working lives. Yet, sales professionals are not regularly offered additional training and development from their employers to advance their careers. Therefore, you can incentivize your staff by offering high-achievers access to exclusive professional development opportunities, such as:
- Mentorship programs, which may offer one-on-one or group mentorship from relevant leaders at your company;
- Cross-training, which can provide staff knowledge and skills in connected fields to boost performance in sales or prepare them for a career transition;
- Career coaching, which can help you and your workers better understand their short- and long-term career goals as well as how to achieve them;
- Tuition reimbursement, which can help sales professionals obtain valuable credentials to qualify them for the next stages of their careers.
Gifts
Gifts are some of the most flexible incentives because you can adjust them based on the occasion, the employee, your budget and more without reducing their effectiveness. You might give gifts to mark birthdays, anniversaries or company-wide holidays. You might also offer gifts as spontaneous rewards to show gratitude to a worker for a job well done.
You should try to ensure that any gifts you give are of notable value to the recipient. For example, if you choose wines as gifts, you should be certain that your employees enjoy wine (and try to find out what kind of wine they prefer). You might try to make the wine special by choosing a vineyard close to your worker’s hometown or a vintage from their birth year. The more personally meaningful the gift, the more incentivized your team member will be.
Team Awards
Every year – or even as frequently as every quarter – you might bring your workers together outside of work to celebrate individual and team achievements via an awards event. With formal awards, you can spotlight every member of your team and show your appreciation for their strengths to build their confidence and improve their performance.
While getting employees engaged is difficult, creativity can make it happen. In fact, if you organize the event at a sophisticated venue and couple trophies or certificates with more meaningful gifts, like tech gadgets or travel vouchers, you will see enthusiastic participation from your sales team.
Personal Messages
Workers don’t always need big, showy displays to feel energized and engaged. Though most sales professionals are extroverts, plenty appreciate the power of smaller gestures, like private messages of gratitude and enthusiasm for hard work. Personal messages don’t have to be long to increase motivation; just a couple sentences explaining what they did and how appreciative you are can increase a worker’s drive. However, timing does matter. Try to send your note as soon as possible for maximum impact.
The same incentive program won’t work forever. If you want to continue seeing your sales team enthusiastic about their work, try something different — and fast. The sooner you start experimenting with creative incentive programs, the sooner you will see which ones work for your team, and the sooner your company will benefit from bigger, better sales.
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