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Date
2 January 2017
Author
Delphine Duclos
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Implementing a sales animation program that successfully mobilizes all salespeople is a common challenge for Sales Departments.
That’s why, in this article, Hervé Aulner, Sales Director of La Poste group, answers the following question: “How to develop the collective performance of your salespeople?”
Indeed, between the top salespeople who prefer to keep best practices to themselves and those who know in advance that they won’t win the traditional annual challenge, it’s difficult to combine incentives in a single program that will address this entire population.
So how do you develop animation programs that will succeed in targeting all your salespeople and not just the top performers or the laggards?
Here are the 6 Keys to a Sales Animation that Will Improve the Performance of all your Salespeople:
1 – Choose Relevant Indicators
The choice of indicators is always a delicate subject. However, the most effective solution is probably to use both outcome indicators and activity indicators.
Outcome indicators include, for example, revenue, deal amount, or margin (which you can then break down by product or product line). As an activity indicator, depending on your business, it can be the number of appointments, recommendations, calls, or results from micro-training quizzes, or even progress curves. Thanks to activity indicators, the most deserving (who are not always the challenge winners) can see their efforts rewarded and measured.
Together, these indicators will provide you with a reliable and balanced basis for establishing your rankings. You will notably be able to measure the potential of your salespeople using activity indicators and target their areas for improvement.
2 – Group Salespeople by Similar Potential Level
Thanks to these indicators, you will therefore have the possibility to rank your salespeople according to several criteria. Use it to form teams with equivalent potential.
This factor ensures a certain equality of starting chances in the competition: something that traditional challenges, where the winner is very often the same, do not offer.
Through this dynamic of teams with similar potential, you give everyone the opportunity to win, which increases the motivation of those who would not have been able to win a traditional challenge: i.e., the entire group and the laggards. And this does not impact the motivation of the top performers, as they still have the possibility to win.
3 – Don’t Forget the Daily Challenge Animation
Indeed, animation allows for the implementation of motivational levers that will resonate with all your teams – both high and low performers. It is especially an opportunity to create team spirit, fuel the competitive spirit, and strengthen communication.
Use a platform that allows and facilitates the sharing of best practices within teams, and then between teams. The platform plays an important role in this sharing of best practices since individuals who perform best naturally tend not to share the reasons for their success, in order to remain first.
A fun and engaging platform, coupled with the inclusion of best practice sharing in performance indicators, encourages salespeople to communicate their successes.
Also use gamification to add vitality to the challenge, especially for the micro-training part.
4 – the Pace of Sales Animation
It is important that the pace of the animation is sustained: to animate means to bring to life, to give substance to something (literally: a soul animates a body). The best way to ensure salespeople’s adherence to an animation program is to make it as active and interactive as possible.
Plan a rigorous animation program, possibly with milestones to maintain team motivation in the long term. Thanks to these success milestones, in a challenge for example, it is possible to measure the progress of teams and reward them accordingly.
5 – Salespeople’s Engagement in the Sales Animation Program
As we mentioned in the previous point: a good animation program is an active and interactive one. This implies giving salespeople a certain leeway, without which they will not be able to engage and keep the program alive.
Choosing a tool dedicated to sales animation provides salespeople with a tool they will own. The more control salespeople have over this tool, the more they will be able to keep it alive.
6 – Management Coaching
Beware, the choice of a tool does not determine the success or the animation of the program. This remains the responsibility of management: it is they who must provide the initial impetus and pave the way for salespeople to fully engage.
All the above points call for a more horizontal management approach, at least concerning animation. This type of management requires shifting more towards the model of a sports coach than a traditional hierarchical model. And being a sports coach requires particular attention to each player as well as continuous monitoring.
Now you know everything. Or almost. The rest can be found in this new White Paper Sales Challenge – The Keys to Success
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Date
2 January 2017
Author
Delphine Duclos