Sales Animation: Mastering the Budget for your Sales Challenges (1/3)

Sales animation is essential for the success of your sales challenges. From the Latin ‘anima,’ its primary definition is ‘the vital breath, the soul.’ In a more modern sense, sales animation represents all daily activities carried out to train, motivate, and retain sales teams. A sales challenge that is not animated will be lifeless, won’t motivate as you would have hoped, and its overall effectiveness will suffer. In this series of 3 articles, we will deliver essential insights for building and implementing your sales animation: budget and hidden costs, benchmarking best practices, and finally, return on investment.

Part 2: Sales Animation: Analysis of Best Practices (2/3)
Part 3: Sales Animation: Maximizing Return on Investment (3/3)

The budget for sales animation is a set of costs centered around the three action verbs that define it: train, motivate, retain. This budget can therefore include your training initiatives such as e-learning and quizzes, as well as your efforts to motivate, such as incentives. Variable compensation, however, is not a component of the budget because it is a contractual action you have established with your sales representatives.

Sales Animation Budget Composition

In practice, the budget is broken down into 4 main parts.

• Incentives, which are essential for each challenge. Trips, gift vouchers, innovative incentives – the choice is yours!
• Tools, which allow visualizing individual performance or choosing rewards. Excel, an online store, a website, or a platform specialized in challenges like Incenteev are examples of systems.
• Project management, which includes all human and technical resources you implement to create, run, and manage the challenge daily.
• The last cost is often overlooked, forgotten, or unknown. These are taxes. URSSAF is increasingly rigorous regarding sales animation budgets, and you won’t be able to avoid them. These taxes are 90% linked to your incentives budget and 10% to the resources you use for your project management.

Knowing how to break down your sales animation budget allows you to predict precisely which line item you will allocate a certain amount of resources to. Many organizations have neglected taxes or project management in their provisional budget, and the consequences are severe. Organizing your budget is therefore the first key to the successful implementation of your sales animation.

In a second article, we will look at how to optimize the breakdown of your budget and what the most important expenditure items are, along with a benchmark of best practices.