Sales Challenge: Tracking and Engagement (3/4)

A well-structured sales challenge significantly increases the motivation of your sales force and your revenue. This helps to re-motivate your teams and boost their sales performance.

To set up a challenge, there are several important steps:

1. Preparation and Definition
2. Announcement and launch
3. Monitoring and engagement
4. Closing and review

After the launch of your challenge, you must track and engage with it daily for it to be truly effective and for your team to remain involved throughout its duration. To do this, find below the elements not to neglect in your sales challenge engagement.

I Implement an Effective Engagement Tool

A web tool is used in most cases and is highly recommended. With a dedicated website or web platform, you make your operation more fun, accessible everywhere, interactive, and you accelerate communication during the challenge.

Indeed, the web simplifies the organization, launch, but especially the engagement, responsiveness, and tracking of your incentive. It’s the ideal way to address all participants simultaneously, which becomes even more important during external challenges (distribution network, agencies, etc.) where information needs to be relayed and multiple geographically separated sales reps engaged.

Incenteev, the enterprise social network dedicated to sales professionals, allows you to centralize all management of your sales challenges on a single tool accessible everywhere on all your screens: all your employees can find challenge information, their results, advice, and training on a single platform.

Throughout the Sales Challenge, I Make Sure to Apply:

Regular Communication

The company’s involvement in the challenge must be demonstrated daily. Sending one email per month or circulating a memo at the end of the challenge to announce the rankings is not really effective. You must implement regular communication to relay important information, as well as engage and remind participants about the contest.

To ensure that each employee is fully involved in the operation, you must communicate to them:

• Game information: the rules, objectives, rewards, etc. These elements must remain accessible throughout the challenge.
• Information on the contest’s progress: Post your messages on your web platform so they are visible to all participants, send emails for special information and announcements.
• Regular engagement activities: Sayings, jokes, news related to your operation, don’t hesitate to disseminate as much information as possible. The main goal is to keep your challenge alive.

With Incenteev, the enterprise social network dedicated to sales forces, you streamline and accelerate the communication of your messages: publications visible to all, automatic email sends daily or with each announcement, new message indicator. You also ensure the readership and impact of your publications by seeing which members have read your message.

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

Real-time Results Tracking

For a sales challenge to be effective and engage your sales force, results must be updated in real-time or almost. This is what makes the competition dynamic and successful.

Giving your employees the rankings once a month does not maintain motivation. The more frequent the updates, the greater the stimulation for your sales force.

• Track individual results: You can then react and intervene at the right moment based on your observations. This allows you, for example, to coach and encourage your teams during a performance dip, to re-energize a struggling sales rep, or to congratulate a participant who has just achieved a good score.
• Grant your employees access to results: Self-tracking is the number one motivation factor in a challenge, which is why you must make the rankings accessible to participants at all times. Your sales rep can compare themselves to others and then motivate themselves to achieve the goals they set personally. For example, if they see they are 4^th and there’s only one week left in the challenge, they tend to give their all to reach the podium before the end of the game and perform better. Progress attracts progress: a person lagging in the rankings who improves their score is encouraged by their own efforts and continues their momentum.

Send personalized emails to your employees to inform them of the rankings and their individual results. You can save time by automating this score delivery.

Individual Support and Coaching

Train, help, coach your teams: A sales challenge is also an opportunity to train and develop your sales force. To do this, provide them with training materials and best practices, allocate time to answer questions, etc. In summary: remain available and support them to maintain motivation around the contest.

Offer spaces for mutual support: To optimize each employee’s strengths, it is necessary for them to be able to exchange and help each other daily. Invite them to share their experience and best practices, discuss their difficulties, report field information, and share client successes.

Let them give their opinions and advice in order to foster mutual support and unite teams.

Recognition of each Participant’s Efforts

A challenge is by definition a rewarding operation as it allows for performance to be rewarded. But also take advantage of this incentive to commend everyone’s efforts. Recognition is a powerful motivator that costs you nothing ! It’s simply about recognizing the successes, big and small, of your sales reps, whether they are potential challenge winners or not. Congratulate them, preferably publicly, and encourage them to maintain their efforts. Also consider the “recognition for all” in choosing your challenge rewards by opting for a reward for all your employees based on their results, or by tiers. Thus, remind them that it’s not necessary to be the best to be recognized and rewarded, at their own level.

Maintaining Momentum and Engagement throughout the Challenge Period

In any sales challenge, especially when they are quite long, you must implement reminder systems and even occasional engagement activities to energize it and maintain the interest of sales reps.

Regular Reminders

It is necessary to regularly revisit the challenge, its objectives, and the rewards. You can simply allocate a moment in your weekly or monthly meetings for this purpose, or organize a few dedicated team meetings during the challenge to refocus participants on it.

Also, plan personalized email sends to re-engage sales reps. Inform them of the remaining time and current ranking, remind them of the reward and the score they need to reach it. You can also choose to automate these reminders with Incenteev.

Warning! Discussing the challenge regularly is necessary, but only to relay information with real added value: new scores, new help document, etc. Sending daily reminders without providing anything useful risks tiring out your employees.

One-off engagement activities:

Especially for longer challenges, you can consider introducing “mini-challenges” or “booster effect” activities to re-energize the competition.

For example:

“This week only: points collected count double!”

“Until the end of the month, the first to reach 100 prospecting calls wins a gift voucher”

“Answer the ‘Product X Launch’ quiz correctly, and win 100 extra points/a restaurant lunch”

This way, relaunch the operation and re-motivate your employees.

The way you run your sales challenge largely determines the success and effectiveness of your operation. If you don’t keep it alive, it won’t stimulate your sales reps or encourage them to excel to achieve their goals.

Engaging and Retaining Your Sales Force

Other Articles You might be Interested in:

• Sales Challenge: engaging your entire sales force