Sales Challenge: engaging your entire sales force

A 5% sales increase among the core group would represent 4 times more revenue than a 10% sales increase among laggards or stars. Indeed, as illustrated below, the core group comprises the majority of the sales force and thus represents a major source of wealth. How can you fully engage your sales force to boost its performance? Two words: sales challenge.

A sales challenge helps advance the entire sales force despite significant disparities in results and sales expertise among salespeople referred to as “stars,” “laggards,” or “core group.” What Strategies Should Be Adopted to Engage Your Entire Sales Force?

Value Your Salespeople

To ensure your salespeople’s enthusiasm for a sales challenge, you must ensure that every participant feels capable of winning. A victory accessible to all will increase participation rates and, consequently, your company’s performance. Furthermore, one of the biggest motivators for salespeople is the recognition of their work. Therefore, to make a sales challenge accessible to everyone, two strategies should be followed:

• Reward Performance to Engage Your Stars
• Reward Progress to Engage Your Core Group and Laggards in Achieving Their Goals.

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Unite Your Salespeople Around Company Culture

The considerations for a sales challenge differ from one company to another, particularly depending on the organization’s culture.

• If a company is decentralized and salespeople are dispersed in the field, it’s good to revive team spirit and a sense of belonging from time to time to rally the troops. How? By organizing a team challenge where collaboration and mutual support are the keys to success.
• If a company seeks to empower its salespeople to rekindle confidence and a sense of pride within its sales force in a fragile context, individual sales challenge strategies are encouraged. Furthermore, the lure of gain, in the case of material rewards, will increase your sales force’s competitiveness and, consequently, its performance.

Value Milestones as Much as Results

A well-executed sales challenge promotes virtuous and productive behaviors through multiple steps to follow to earn points, in order to popularize good habits and best practices that serve performance. For example: customer satisfaction, the number of prospecting calls per week, and the CRM adoption rate are success factors and should, therefore, be highlighted during sales challenges, just as much as the results.

• For example, with a client, we developed a contest mechanism rewarding stars based on their raw performance and the core group based on their long-term progress. The challenges were structured as micro-steps and aimed to encourage the progress of core group salespeople through a “step-by-step” format. Thanks to this mechanism, a significant improvement in the core group’s performance results was observed, as well as greater engagement, which resulted in a 10 to 20% improvement in revenue per salesperson.
• Another example of a sales challenge that values the progress of sales teams is the tiered challenge. It is organized by levels to be reached by accumulating points in order to unlock tiers and thus obtain rewards. For example, if a salesperson manages to orchestrate the replacement of a competitor’s product with an organizational product at a client’s site, the player earns points and potentially unlocks a tier. Different tiers are thus unlocked as points accumulate, subsequently leading to access to rewards.

Tailor Your Training

Access to raw performance results does not allow for determining individual weaknesses and areas for improvement. It is necessary to determine the specific sources of difficulty for each salesperson for greater productivity. To this end, the training strategies within sales challenges encourage support and personalized learning.

• For example, Mark Roberge offers a decomposed approach to evaluating individual performance, through the recognition of intermediate steps to success, in order to identify deficient skills at each stage of the challenge. To this end, the evaluation metrics used vary depending on the circumstances (e.g., leads generated, first meetings obtained, conversion rate to signed contracts, number of product demonstrations performed).

It is observed that salespeople with the same Leads/First Meeting ratio may encounter difficulties at different stages and for various reasons. It is therefore essential to identify the specific source of difficulty for each salesperson and to avoid an overly generic training system for greater productivity.

Conclusion

For greater productivity, engaging your entire sales force requires a sales challenge aimed at valuing salespeople, their progress, their results, and their ability to collaborate. Furthermore, the benefits resulting from an individualized approach to the sales challenge are numerous: specialized training and challenges accessible to everyone.