Sales Challenge: Preparation and Objective Setting (1/4)

How to Define and Prepare your Sales Challenge?

According to Action Commerciale, 81.3% of executives observe a real increase in their revenue when their company organizes sales challenges. Implementing a sales challenge indeed helps to mobilize (or remobilize) a team and strengthen their motivation, as it taps into the competitive nature of each salesperson. Once their motivation is increased, your sales performance follows suit.

To launch a sales challenge, there are several important steps:

1. Preparation and Definition
2. Announcement and Launch
3. Monitoring and Engagement
4. Closing and Review

Let’s address the first, crucial step: defining your sales challenge and its preparation.

1. What is the strategic objective of your challenge?

You shouldn’t launch a sales challenge just for fun. It is essential to define an objective that aligns with your company’s strategy: a new product, a new sales organization, etc.

If this is not the case, it can prove counterproductive! For example, a sales challenge organized around the sales of an end-of-life product, when a launch is planned soon, risks disorienting your salespeople, who will focus solely on your old product. Therefore, make sure not to contradict your company’s strategic directions and projects.

Note: Always remember to quantify your objectives! In a sales challenge, results must be quantifiable to establish rankings.

Here are some examples of objectives: increase sales of a declining product, market a new product, boost revenue at year-end to reach set objectives, retain partners, reach new customers, validate training achievements after a change in sales approach, generate leads, etc.

The Sales Challenge in 2019: The Essential Guide to Engage Your Sales Force to Download Here

2. How does your sales challenge work?

For the challenge to work, the mechanism must be simple, adapted, and accessible. Don’t try to create an overly complicated concept: if the system is difficult to understand, the challenge will not be engaging and, on the contrary, it will demotivate your teams.

The mechanism will change depending on the sales community you want to target. If it involves internal salespeople competing against each other, or if it involves distributors/agency networks where entities are competing, your approach will not be the same.

What Branding?

To make your sales challenge impactful, you need to place it within a universe. This refers to the identity, especially visual, of your challenge. The stronger it is, the more it will engage your salespeople.

You must therefore choose a theme, a name, and a visual universe. To help you, draw inspiration, for example, from recent movie releases, current events, or the time of year and events (Christmas, Spring, Easter, Winter, etc.).

Incenteev offers a range of ready-made visual themes for challenges organized via its platform!

Next, you need to decide on the deployment of this universe. You can simply implement it on the website dedicated to the sales challenge, create flyers to distribute to salespeople, put up posters, or redecorate your offices. The more visible the contest is within the company, the more it will encourage serious participation. We therefore invite you, for the duration of the challenge, to decorate your premises in the colors of your universe or even display the reward near the coffee corner. Don’t hesitate to ask us for advice!

What Duration?

A sales challenge should be special and be set for short durations to maintain the salesperson’s interest throughout the period.

Note: The shorter the sales challenge, the simpler its concept must be so that the sales force can ‘get into it’ as quickly as possible. Also, adapt your reward to the duration: the longer the challenge, the more significant the prize must be, so as not to let the operation lose momentum.

Some examples:

• 3 days to one week, for a telemarketing challenge
• 2 weeks to one month, to support the launch of a new product or to compensate for a drop in sales performance
• up to 3 months, in a context of significant change (team merger, change in sales strategy, company restructuring, etc.)

Note: For challenges set for more than 6 months for the same objective, we advise you to divide the operation into sub-challenges of a maximum of one month, focusing on a specific aspect. This also allows for faster feedback in case of a new product launch, for example, to identify difficulties encountered during sales, modify or adapt offers, etc.

Good to know:In such cases, a tool like Incenteev allows you to create as many challenges as you want in just a few minutes, which represents a considerable time saving.

How to Measure Scores?

Score measurement must be simple; there’s no point in having 10 criteria that add up! Prioritize ONE unique criterion that can be easily tracked. If you have several indicators (no more than 3!), make sure they are converted into a single point score to simplify participant ranking.

To motivate all your salespeople, prioritize fairness: your sales challenge must be able to give every salesperson a chance to win. To do this, you can weight the results in the following way:

• Assign objectives to each of your employees according to their experience, client portfolio, seniority, past results, etc.
• Group your participants by categories (for example, by experience: seniors / juniors; or by geographical area: IDF / Province), and assign objectives to each category.

Which Indicators to Choose?

Your challenge indicators can be qualitative, quantitative, or both. However, they must be quantifiable to obtain a ranking. It’s up to you to determine them!

• Examples of quantitative objectives: number of new clients, revenue generated, number of calls made, number of leads obtained, etc.
• Examples of qualitative objectives: customer satisfaction, quality of customer relationship, …

What Prize Structure?

There are three distinct ways to proceed:

• You can reward only “the podium,” i.e., the first winner(s). This approach motivates your top performers but tends to discourage the main group (the core of salespeople) who see no point if they have no chance of winning.
• You can implement a tiered system: you reward each participant based on their performance. For a score between X and Y, the participant wins a specific prize, with a more significant prize at each higher tier. This way, your team is also involved and motivated because everyone has a reward at the end. However, in this scenario, your top-performing salespeople don’t always give their best.
• You can combine both approaches: The top 2 or 3 receive a higher prize, while for the others, the tiered system is implemented. This type of challenge is the most effective because it motivates the entire team.

Also note that setting up objective thresholds allows participants to earn a first reward quite quickly, thereby energizing the challenge from the beginning and throughout its duration.

Important: Don’t forget to set a minimum threshold! You wouldn’t want to offer gifts to salespeople who haven’t achieved significant results… This threshold ensures that rewards are only given once a certain objective is met.

What Reward?

To determine the budget and the possible rewards, you must first evaluate the expected ROI of your challenge.

Next, you will be able to choose the prizes to award. For this, it is preferable to know the profile of each salesperson to determine the rewards that will attract them most.

Some ideas:

• If you are targeting “younger” teams: extreme activity packages (parachute jumping, race car driving, helicopter initiation, etc.), technology & high tech, festive or trendy getaways, online vouchers, gift certificates, etc.
• If it’s more for “seniors”: cultural and relaxing trips, restaurant or weekend activity packages (e.g., Relais et Châteaux), gourmet gift boxes (chocolates, foie gras, wines, champagne…), etc.
• For your distributors, if you don’t have information on the salespeople’s profiles, prioritize material goods: high tech, home appliances, or travel.

Note that physical rewards (material goods or travel/experience) are 2 to 3 times more effective* than monetary gains (money or gift certificates).

Furthermore, experiences can be even more motivating than material goods. Indeed, these are generally activities to be done by 2 or more people, often involving the salesperson’s spouse, children, or a loved one. Thus, the challenge also extends into your employee’s personal life, as they will be encouraged by their loved ones to perform! Their desire to succeed and their sales motivation will also be stronger if they can please their loved ones and gain their recognition.

Finally, a lived experience encourages the salesperson to talk about it with colleagues, even afterwards, by showing photos of their trip to Thailand or their weekend at Disneyland, recounting their bungee jump, etc. They will share their satisfaction of having won and the pleasure gained from their reward, thus motivating other salespeople for your next challenges.

Also think original and “privileged” with a VIP evening at a restaurant, with a chauffeur, for example. Or, a private preview movie screening. You don’t necessarily need an astronomically priced reward to get people excited.

You can consider rewards that are inexpensive but unique because they will give a real privilege to the winner. For a large company, this could be, for example, a lunch with the CEO, or an invitation to an exclusive evening for executives and the executive board: you offer your agent the opportunity to meet and discuss directly with the group’s senior executives, which can be very rewarding !

You can also offer a seat on the board of directors for a determined period: it’s an honor for the salesperson, who will take an important position within the company, and an asset for you, as you can also get valuable feedback directly from the field, through your winner.

Or, keep it simple like Oracle and send your winners into space ! ;-)

Important: One point must not be forgotten: taxation! Indeed, you must declare the rewards to URSSAF as distributed income, and your winning employees must too! So, be sure to include this point in your game rules (which must be accessible at all times), to avoid an “unpleasant surprise” for your salespeople. We will return to the details of challenge taxation in a future article.

3. What tools will you use?

Emails, SMS, flyers, service notes, weekly meetings, dedicated website, online challenge management tools: various tools and ways to run your challenge exist. Choose those that will be most useful and best suited to the operation.

Make sure the challenge is accessible everywhere! For this, think more about the web, which is often easier to access, simplifies communication, and allows for real-time results tracking. We will go into more detail about the tools when we discuss challenge animation (step 3).

4. Create your challenge rules

Each of the points determined below must appear in your game rules, which must be communicated to participants and remain accessible throughout the duration of the challenge.

Once you have determined these points, you can use Incenteev to create your challenge and launch it in just a few clicks!

*Source: Maritz Study, 2006

The Sales Challenge in 2019: The Essential Guide to Engage Your Sales Force to Download Here