Sales Challenge: 4 Tips to Effectively Achieve Your Goals

The objectives of a sales challenge must be consistent with your performance indicators!
“Increasing the number of phone calls” should never be the main objective of one of your challenges.

It’s true. Implementing a successful sales challenge means understanding the long-term issues that can be managed by a specific focus on quantifiable indicators (such as the number of phone calls) and on improving the sales process.

Ultimately, if you challenge your sales reps on their call numbers, it’s because an increase in calls leads to more appointments, which in turn lead to more client contracts.
These objectives should be highlighted, as the quantitative variable is merely a means to achieve them. The more concrete and defined your objectives are, the more involved and eager your sales representatives will feel to achieve them.

In addition to long-term projection, it’s important to keep these 4 tips in mind to achieve your goals during your sales challenges in 2016:

• Be ambitious
• Involve all your sales reps
• Diversify your measurement indicators
• Manage the duration of your sales challenge

Let’s elaborate on these key points one by one.

Be ambitious in your sales challenge

Whether it’s your objectives or the rewards offered to your sales reps: aim high. As Mark Roberge, CRO of Hubspot, states, “a sales target that is too low will not significantly impact your sales reps’ motivation”. Having ambitious yet realistic goals creates a true awareness of the performance your sales force must achieve.

De plus, les récompenses accordées doivent être cohérentes avec vos objectifs. Proposer des récompenses qui ne suscitent pas d’intérêt particulier ou qui sont quantitativement mal évaluées sera un frein au succès de votre challenge. Faites exploser la motivation de vos commerciaux en proposant des récompenses innovantes et fun en vous inspirant de notre livre blanc « Challenge commercial : les clés du succès ». Intéressez et inspirez vos salariés, ils sauront vous surprendre.

Involve all your sales reps in your incentives

Change your approach to sales challenges. A common mistake is to focus on incentivizing your stars (your top-performing sales reps), who typically make up 10% of your workforce. Instead, aim to maximize the involvement of your main sales force, which represents about 80% of your teams.

Generally, a slight performance increase from your main sales force will have a greater impact on your overall performance than a significant increase from your stars. Fostering positive and consistent growth within your main sales force will lead to a uniform influence on your key metrics.

Consequently, to maximize your results, your sales leaders and managers should target the largest segment of the workforce, not the highest-performing one. It is, of course, important not to neglect your “underperforming” sales reps, who require more personalized, complex motivation and special attention.

Applying these management factors will allow for a consistent and long-term investment from all your teams in the proposed challenge.

Diversify your measurement indicators

The more diversified quantifiable indicators you use in your sales incentive, the better you’ll be able to analyze your sales reps’ performance and achieve your projected results. A recent Harvard Business Review study has shown that a sales challenge incorporating multiple measurement indicators yields much better results than one using only a single indicator. However, be careful not to overdo it! Focus on two to three key indicators to optimize your results and facilitate the tracking of your sales challenge.

Diversifying these factors will give you the ability to target your objectives in multiple ways, analyze key points, and better frame your incentive.

Manage the duration of your sales challenge

The length of your challenge is crucial for its success. If it’s too short, your teams won’t have time to adapt; if it’s too long, they’ll lose momentum. Opt for a sales incentive with a minimum duration of one month and not exceeding 6 months. The higher your stakes and the more extended your sales challenge, the more time your sales force will have to get involved and embrace the challenge.

According to recent scientific studies, a change in behavior for an employee or a team within a company takes approximately 66 days. Therefore, consider these figures and propose long-term challenges to allow all your staff to adapt and initiate the motivation process. Keep your incentive dynamic throughout its duration by providing timely and controlled boosts.

Imagine different rewards, objectives framed differently, or implement tailored boosters, and you will enable your staff to remotivate themselves by stimulating them daily.

To achieve your goals during your sales challenges, embrace flexibility, ambition, and optimization. Implementing these 4 tips will enable effective management of your objectives and optimized mobilization of your staff. So, are you ready to succeed in your sales challenges?