How to Create Healthy Sales Team Competition?
One of the most common things that every manager yearns for is a highly motivated sales team who are all achievers, share unbreakable team spirit and have proactive collaboration. Several research conducted found that all the best sales teams had 2 things in common:
- They held their team members to higher levels of accountability.
- The managers of these teams were often not afraid of raising quotas.
This shows that sales teams thrive in a fast-paced environment with high expectations, making them a high-performing sales team. It is here that friendly competition sales come into the scene.
Competition sales are the fuel for high-performing sales teams to continuously reach new levels. Having competition sales incorporated in your team will hence have a positive impact on the motivation, effort, and morale of your sales team.
Competition inspires the employees to stretch their limits because while some might be unable to see the light at the end of the tunnel, they would persevere to find it when they see their teammates succeeding against the same obstacles.
The competition will give an incentive for everyone to show that they are strong and capable even against adversities. When it comes to sales professionals and their sales targets, the competition will ensure that they meet them with passion, stamina, and confidence.
This article will take you through the ABCs of creating healthy competition sales.
Preparatory Steps to Fire Up Healthy Competition Sales Among Your Sales Representatives
Preparing and promoting a winning culture of healthy competition sales can be boiled down to these four preparatory steps:
Step 1- Identify the Problem that Needs to be Solved
This step is important so that you can figure out what objective you have to achieve, measure, and how to gauge its success. These can be:
- Do you want to increase sales?
- Do you want to boost engagement?
- Do you want to improve team relations?
- Do you want to improve employee engagement?
While setting your objectives, you have to make sure that they correlate with the goals of your sales director and your executive team. The competition sales that you set should be of the kind that triggers performances that will drive sustainable growth for your business- rather than just a monthly spike in operating incomes as against operating expenses. This will increase your profit margin in the long run.
Step 2- Make a Plan
Your next step would be to plan how to introduce healthy competition sales without risking your quality and hence lose customer loyalty. The several plans can include:
- A sales contest?
- A leaderboard?
- Monthly challenges?
- Daily challenges?
- Branch challenges?
In this step, you will have to tailor your gamification method in a manner that suits your objectives as well as the culture of your business. Whatever competition sales you decide upon, you will have to make it time-bound and even have a backup plan ready if the reaction you receive is unlike what you had hoped for. You should also set up channels through which your employees can give feedback and express their concerns if they arise.
Step 3- Visualize Your Sales Data
One of the best ways to keep your team engaged with whatever competition sales you have organized is by using a visualization tool. To start with, you can use a whiteboard or a poster.
If, however, you are planning to keep your team excited, engaged, and involved every day, then you should set up a TV screen that will display the sales dashboard- like an interactive leaderboard or the real-time results of a sales contest. If you have already introduced prizes for the competition sales winner, then you can also display these on the TV screen or have a wheel of fortune display it all creatively.
Step 4- Start Your Competition Fast and Improve Them with Each Round
Before you start your competition sales, make sure to remember two keywords- friendly and healthy. You will have to make sure that your contests and other competition initiatives do not cause tensions in your team. Rather, they should lead to an increase in the team spirit, with the sales team members working together to help each other reach their targets and win prizes.
This will prevent undue sabotaging of deals, ensure proactive customer service, and even positive customer feedback. If, however your competition becomes unhealthy, you should re-evaluate it immediately and find an alternative to make the situation friendly and free of hostile competitions.
How to Encourage a Positive, Competitive Climate Among Your Sales Representatives?
If your sales team gets into the trap of unhealthy competition sales, things will become real ugly and chaotic really fast. This is because then it would no longer be a team, but rather a group of selfish individuals who would be picking on each other, tearing each other down, stealing each other’s leads, messing up with lead management and sales management, and even practicing bad sales promotion techniques.
By following these tips, managing your sales team while encouraging a positive, competitive climate among your sales representatives will become easier. They are:
Emphasize on Self-Improvement
To have healthy competitive sales, one should start by competing against themselves- as this will help them realize how they can do better. Self-improvement will also make it less likely that they would blame others for their performance or lack of it.
Additionally, by outselling themselves, your sales representatives will become self-reliant and willing to share sales tips with others. These sales tips will help in making the necessary changes to a sales funnel to get increased sales.
Publicize Individual Progress through Gamification
In sales, gamification is all about applying the engaging elements of games to a business setting. The defined boundaries and rules of your gamification system will make things clear and easy to understand. It will also help in removing the animosity out of the competitive sales.
To further ensure healthy competition sales, let your sales team see each other’s daily and quarterly progress via a gamified dashboard. The benefit of this would be visible when your sales representatives are having a rough day.
While it would be easier to blame it on the leads, their colleagues’ success on the gamification dashboard would motivate them to go the extra mile for hitting their next sale and sales. Such a practice would therefore help in increasing your revenue as well as net profits. This dashboard would also make it easier for you to monitor sales made by your sales team.
Creating Sales Leaderboard
This is a simple and friendly way of introducing healthy competition sales in your sales department. A good sales leaderboard is one that is engaging, interactive and displays live sales data from your CRM software automatically. This means that your office whiteboard cannot be your sales leaderboard. A sales leaderboard like this will liven up the competition sales in your office and motivate your sales team to perform their best.
Give Everyone a Buddy
When someone new joins your sales team, you should pair them with a tenured sales representative as they would then learn the quick and effective ways of navigating challenging calls, handling cold calls, overcoming objections, and how to persuade and get the deal closed faster. The new joiner would hence get acquainted with all the crucial sales administrator tactics to meet the objectives and close the deals faster.
They would also learn the tricks of doing this while keeping customers happy and satisfied so that you are also encouraging returning customers. Such a practice would foster deeper relationships among your coworkers and even ensure healthy competition sales.
Creating Sales Contests
Sales contests are simple but effective ways of motivating your sales team and fostering healthy competition sales. In sales contests, your sales team members will be competing with each other for rewards based on given KPIs like, for example, retail sector KPIs and ACV and ARR.
In the case of sales contests, activity-based objectives work best. Your sales team should focus on targets like the number of calls made or emails sent, as this will encourage consistent and effective use of the already established sales process. The more activities being completed at their right times, the better would be your results and therefore higher would be your account receivables, while your account payable would be lesser in proportion.
It is this behavior that you would want to reward and not the closed deals or leads qualified as this cannot be controlled by your sales team entirely. Also, by focusing more on such results, you risk them becoming a victim of workplace stress while also leading to them getting the deals closed by the wrong buyer personas.
If you are a company that has its offices in multiple locations, you could divide each location into a bracket and the sales representatives competing in each bracket in miniature knockout battles.
As the sales contest progresses, sales representatives from different locations will start battling for the grand prize, which would result in the sales team of each location being brought together by their location’s finalist. You could even set up an office prize if their office’s finalist wins. This would further foster team spirit and healthy competition sales. Sales contests are hence only as limited as your imagination.
Do Not Build Sales Contest Only Around Top Selling Sales Representatives
When talking about sales contests, the first thing that comes to mind is how they should be for the maximum revenue earned. As a manager, you may think that an incentive like winning a 4K TV would motivate all to do their best and bring maximum earnings for your business. However, this is a misconception.
What happens in such sales contests is that the sales representatives who always do the best will pull ahead, and others- who are weak as compared to them will feel dejected and fall behind as soon as they realize that they have no real chance of winning. This means that those sales representatives whose performance you want to improve would remain the same or, in the worst-case scenario, become worse than before.
Your competition sales should hence be focused on metrics that are more than just revenue. This will ensure the overall development of your sales team- which would be more beneficial to you in the long run. For instance, an award for the one who found the most number of qualifying leads. As for top sales awards to incentivize excellence, they should get trophies like “Account Executive of the Quarter.”
Reinforcing Strong Performance
In sales, recognition is essential to keep the motivation and confidence strong. This is because, if you do not give recognition, one would become unsure and unmotivated, which would have a negative impact on their sales presentation.
To prevent this from happening, you should reinforce those behaviors which have resulted in standout performances. This will motivate the sales representatives to repeat them and others to model them. Healthy competition sales inspire individual sales representatives, strengthens the team, and makes the colleagues root for one another- making your company win.
Rewarding Front-end Activity
A sales cycle starts from the most basic activities like cooking demos, making lots of calls, qualifying leads, and passing them along to the top-performing sales representatives, to mention a few. These activities set the framework for success for the entire sales team as well as for your business.
Keeping this in mind, your competition sales should be designed such that they reward all of these front-end activities as well. A secondary benefit of doing this is that your elite sales representatives would stop shirking their most basic responsibilities and hustle when needed- especially if they want to win. This will make your sales team more cohesive and efficient.
Sales Contest Ideas that Creates a Healthy Sales Team Competition
Having a sales contest in your workplace is one of the best ways to have healthy competition sales. These sales contests can be held virtually or physically. Additionally, you can have more than one sales contest in the office within the same time period. The prices for these contests can vary depending on the contest itself and what you decide to keep it as. Some of the sales contests ideas that you can try in your office are:
Daily Prizes
These are given after running a daily sales contest. On each day, you would have your own goal- for example, Monday’s prize would be for most calls, Tuesday’s prize would be for biggest sales, Wednesday’s prize would be for the highest number of email marketing, and so on. Or, you can choose to run the same contest each day and reward a daily prize to each winner.
Salesperson of the Month
This is a very common sales contest wherein you choose your top salesman- either quantitatively by most sales or biggest deal or qualitatively based on the manager’s choice. He or she would be the salesperson of the month and get rewarded for the same.
Conversion Contest
In this contest, the winner would be the salesperson who has the highest number of leads to customer conversions. The reward for this contest can be given daily or monthly, or quarterly, or in the sales kickoff meeting.
However, before holding this contest, make sure that your marketing and sales are properly aligned so that your sales team can access all your sales tracking data and, by using processes such as MEDDIC sales process, decide your sales methodology to convert the sales prospects into customers.
Upsell or Cross-Sell Contest
This competition sales contest is designed to especially increase your upselling and cross-selling. Hence, the winner for this contest would be the one who has the largest or the most significant up-sell or cross-sell. Through this contest, your sales team would be able to find opportunities to make additional sales with the current customers. This can be a larger subscription plan or additional software, and so on.
Retention Contest
This competition sales contest rewards that salesperson who has retained the most customers or has the longest-running customer for the month, quarter, or year. This will encourage your sales team to boost your customer retention and, therefore, your ROI.
Customer Reviews
In this competition sales contest, a salesperson with the highest or with the most positive customer reviews wins. This sales contest requires your sales team to be more involved as they will have to ask for the customer’s reviews after making the sale. It is because of this reason that this sales contest is one of its kind and the best way to ensure proactive customer support and secure the voice of the customer.
Through this competition, you would be able to figure out how to improve your customer’s experience and whether digitized customer service would be of help there. The results and trends observed would be especially useful to your customer success manager, who can then make changes accordingly.
Sales Bingo
Sales bingo is a multifaceted sales contest that will allow your sales team to pursue many different, smaller goals. Just like bingo, sales bingo also requires you to have filled a 5 x 5 bingo chart with objectives like:
- Schedule 3 demos
- Make 25 calls
- Send 5 LinkedIn messages
- Start personal marketing with 10 email addresses received from CTAs
And so on.
Your team would be required to mark off the objectives as they complete them, and the first person to get five in a row would be the winner. Sales bingo is that type of competition sales that should be run only for a specific time period like monthly or quarterly so that it does not become too long.
Most No’s
This is a very positive sales contest as it would reward that salesperson who received the most “no’s” within a week or month or any time period of your choice. While no one likes to hear a no, especially your salesperson, this contest makes them comfortable with hearing the word “no” without demotivating them.
In fact, through this contest, they are encouraged to not give up and make as many calls as they can- pushing past all the objections and refusals. This is one of the best ways to motivate your sales team.
Best Pitch
Under this sales contest, the person who has the best sales pitch in their sales presentation gets rewarded. The winner can be determined by:
- Either holding a meeting where everyone can present their pitch and vote for the best (but not themselves)
- Or have your team present their sales pitch to the VPs and executive and receive feedback from them.
Sales Bracket
This is that kind of competition sales contest where you set a threshold for each pairing like- salesperson with most sales, biggest sale in the month, most no’s, etc.) and then choose a winner to go to the next round of the contest.
These rounds would then lead to the final championship round, with an ultimate winner being declared at the end of it. This contest is unique as you can have a different sales contest for each round, with the stakes being raised as the championship round comes nearer.
Sales Contest Prizes that Creates a Healthy Sales Team Competition
While holding a competition sales contest, the prizes you keep for the winners would become the determining factor of the amount of enthusiasm, participation, and success you are able to encourage. Some of the prizes you can consider giving are:
Monetary Prizes
These can be provided in cash or as a bonus on a paycheck. For long-term sales contests, you will need larger monetary prizes.
Gift Card
It is a fun way to support a local or beloved business and is also considered to be something outside of a standard compensation structure. These can be of a small gifting business, restaurants, movie theaters, prepaid all-purpose gift cards, etc.
Electronics or Equipment
These can include a computer, phone, grill, luggage, camera, coffeemaker, etc.
Complimentary Meals
You can give free lunches for a week or month, or you can offer an order-in option for the winner. You will have to set a spending limit to predict the cost and not have a huge unexpected brunt on your daily cash flow.
Boss for the Day
Through this, the winner would be in charge for the day- working in your office, parking in your parking spot, running or joining a meeting they otherwise would not have.
Free Task from the Boss
Through this, your contest winner would be able to get one task completed by you for free.
Free Vacation Day(s)
You would be giving away a free vacation or personal day as a sales contest prize. This should be used for longer, larger sales contests that run on a less-frequent basis.
Free Personal Development
You would be rewarding a free sales training seminar or educational stipend that they can use for personal development or college. While giving this prize, make sure that your winner comes from a demographic that interests him in such prizes.
Floating Trophy
This is a trophy or a plaque that is rewarded to and passed between the winner of a weekly or monthly sales contest. Such a prize tends to be paired with other smaller incentives like a gift card or small monetary prize.
Winner’s Choice
Your winner would be allowed to choose their prize from the list of prizes that you have given them. This will keep your entire sales team interested and engaged in your contest regardless of their varying interests, as, in the end, they will be able to choose what they want.
How to Run an Effective Sales Contest that Creates Healthy Sales Team Competition?
Things you should do to run an effective sales contest that creates healthy competition sales are:
Keep it Simple
Your salesperson should be able to understand the rules of your sales contests easily. This is because if they are not able to understand the rules of winning or who is currently in the first place, then their enthusiasm for participating gets affected.
To ensure this, you can get a senior salesperson to go through your sales contest and its rules. The added benefit of this would be that they would also be able to point out loopholes or problematic rules. Also, preferably have only one sales contest at a time so that your team does not get distracted and you get the outcome you were looking for.
Make it Fun
Your competition sales contests should have an element of fun- something which makes your salespeople bond with each other and even makes the competition more memorable. The prizes you keep for the winners can have a sense of humor while also reflecting how much their success means to you.
This will improve your overall work environment while also preventing negative competition. Your competitions can also be centered around inside office jokes/ likes- like, the winner gets to take everyone to lunch at a local restaurant that the entire office loves.
Involve Your Sales Team in the Planning Process
One of the best ways to ensure healthy sales team competition is by involving them in the planning process. Another way is letting your sales representatives choose the prizes for the different contests. This will lead to these three positive effects:
- Your sales representatives would be more invested. Having direct control over a major aspect of the competition sales will drive buy-in from the start.
- The rewards would not be what you think they want, but rather what you know they want.
- Your salespeople will feel happier and more involved, respected, and considered when you hand them the reins.
Give Daily or Weekly Updates
This will help the participants to stay committed and motivated to their competition sales contests. A live dashboard is very useful for this purpose.
Do Not Make False Promises
Never promise a prize that you would not be able to give to your salesperson. Always be honest with them, as false promises will ensure that your future competition sales contests see no participation or enthusiasm.
Hand Out the Prizes As Soon As Possible
The deadline for prizes is as important as the deadline for contests, as only then would the winners appreciate it and be enthusiastic about participating in future competition sales contests. If your prizes are delayed, you will lose out on participation in the upcoming competitions.
How Can Deskera Help Your Business with Sales?
Deskera is an all-in-one software that can be accessed across all devices and places. When it comes to sales, two of its software- Deskera CRM and Deskera CRM+ are designed and equipped with features that will help your business with sales.
The sales dashboard of Deskera CRM will help in setting up the sales leaderboard that gets updated in real-time. Additionally, the different KPIs and metrics tracked by both the software will give them insights into how to close deals, contact the customers and get more sales. To do this in an organized way, Deskera CRM+ allows the creation of unlimited sales funnels, landing pages, forms, and segmentation of leads.
It also has high-performing templates available for the same- that you can either use directly or edit and use, or you can even make your own design from scratch. One of the highlights of this feature is that whichever template you use for your landing pages they are automatically optimized for the phone as well as tablet view along with the web view. In fact, you can even build your own lead magnets, product pages, registration pages, opt-in pages, and more to give your marketing the boost it needs.
In the case of Deskera CRM, it tracks and analyzes the performance of open and click-through rates, having the deals updated in real-time along with their insights which will help in finding out which sales process is working the best along with different marketing strategies like performance marketing, content marketing, social media marketing and so on.
Together, they will become the perfect assistants to your sales team.
Key Takeaways
The main benefit of competition sales is that they help you to achieve your objectives. These can be in regards to your customer and customer services or feedback or retention, or they can be in regards to sales or revenue or leads, or they can be in regards to the development or bonding of your sales team and sales representatives with each other.
However, these objectives can be met only when you have a healthy sales team competition. It is hence very important for you to ensure that the competition sales undertaken in your office are healthy, as the result of your sales contests will end up affecting your sales directly or indirectly.
Hence, to encourage a positive, competitive climate among your sales representatives,
- Emphasize on Self-Improvement
- Publicize Individual Progress through Gamification
- Creating Sales Leaderboard
- Give Everyone a Buddy
- Creating Sales Contests
- Do Not Build Sales Contest Only Around Top Selling Sales Representatives
- Reinforcing Strong Performance
- Rewarding Front-end Activity
These, when paired with good sales contest ideas, prizes, and them being planned and held effectively, will be very beneficial to your company. CRM software like Deskera CRM and Deskera CRM+ would greatly help and assist during such competition sales.