Sales team motivation and incentive structures play a pivotal role in helping sales reps achieve their individual sales goals. If designed and implemented effectively, these structures inspire individual sellers to push beyond their comfort zones in pursuit of sales success.
Based on your team’s preferences, an effective incentive program may include both financial and non-financial rewards such as tech gadgets and time off for you and your colleagues.
Transparency
Many sales teams struggle to foster an atmosphere of transparency due to the amount of resources required for sharing information, but there are ways of creating it more efficiently so everyone is kept up-to-date with important developments.
It is paramount to have in place a system which gives sales managers and reps access to data-driven visibility of earnings for reaching certain goals or metrics, making it easy to adjust these goals or metrics according to changing market conditions or business opportunities.
As part of an effective sales rep motivation strategy, this step is essential in creating a plan that is both realistic and obtainable, while keeping sales reps motivated throughout the year. By setting achievable yet challenging goals they will also avoid setting unrealistic or unachievable goals that demotivate team members or decrease morale and could ultimately cause sales reps to quit the sales profession altogether.
Tiered compensation models can also help increase sales transparency by rewarding employees based on how close they come to meeting targets. This approach can help identify and motivate top performers while encouraging middle-of-the-road workers to improve their performance and become stars themselves. It also encourages a culture of transparency among your team while offering healthy competition within it.
Group Incentives
An incentive plan that rewards teams for reaching collective goals can motivate individual and group performance, and align team performance with company objectives while creating a sense of pride among members of that team.
Group incentives typically consist of cash bonuses for meeting or exceeding sales quotas, closing deals or reaching specific sales activity levels. They can also take the form of non-monetary rewards; depending on how best to motivate their team members these could include vacation days, restaurant gift certificates or concert tickets as non-monetary incentives.
Noting the most effective rewards require that they are tailored specifically to sales reps’ individual motivators is key for creating meaningful rewards that resonate. You can accomplish this through polling or surveys, meeting with each sales team member individually or simply asking what motivates them – often what works for one might not motivate another!
Offering professional development opportunities as sales incentives encourages growth and success for all parties involved. A well-trained sales team is better able to tackle complex business challenges while meeting or exceeding quotas, with these types of programs typically having higher returns than traditional cash bonuses or material incentives due to improving performance immediately as well as retention over time.
Recognition
Once salespeople recognize that their efforts are valued, they’ll work harder towards meeting their goals and reaching higher levels of performance. This increased motivation will result in improved sales figures that benefit both team and organization alike.
Financial incentives are an effective way of rewarding individual salespeople, with cash bonuses often making an impressionful statement to team members about how important their role is in driving team motivation. But it is essential that team members consult on which incentives would work best so the program meets everyone’s individual needs.
Experience-driven incentives can create unforgettable memories for salespeople receiving them, such as tickets to sporting events, meals at top restaurants or spa days. Such gifts serve both to honor individual achievements while offering much-needed respite from daily work demands.
Some sales incentives are built around territorial-based achievements, such as scheduling appointments or reaching a specified level of pipeline activity. These types of goals work particularly well when selling longer sales cycles such as software where salespeople may have to wait months or years before customers decide to sign their agreements. It is crucial that targets be carefully set so as not to overwhelm or burnout your team.
Personal Time Off
An enjoyable vacation after closing a big deal can make your team feel appreciated and recognized, while creating lasting bonds within your organization by celebrating together their hard work in meeting company sales goals.
Flexible work arrangements or working from home allow your sales team to enjoy greater work-life balance, which in turn can boost job satisfaction, lower stress levels and enhance overall health – benefits which millennials especially value as sales incentives.
Activity rewards like tickets to sporting events, concerts or dinner at an elegant restaurant are an effective way to motivate sales teams. Unlike cash and gift cards, activity incentives offer memorable experiences which have lasting repercussions for salespeople.
Monetary incentives can be an effective way of stimulating sales teams and showing the correlation between performance and reward. But it’s equally important to have non-cash incentives as some salespeople might respond better to money bonuses or commissions while others would rather experience-based promotions instead. Based on your sales team’s salary structure, product line and total addressable market, it may be that combining cash with non-cash incentives works best in motivating salespeople.
