Why Sales Contests Fail

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of our brand-new eBook: The Winner's Guide to Running Effective Sales Contests.

Before discussing how to run your best inside sales contest, let’s look at a few key reasons most sales contests fail. We’ve spent the last 3 years analyzing sales contest best practices, and across the board, here are the 3 biggest reasons sales contests fail.

They don’t reach 80% of your sales force.
They’re short-sighted or focused around 1 metric.
They fail to offer compelling incentives.

Looking at each reason individually, 2 common threads emerge:

These are characteristics of 90+% of the sales contests companies run.
These contests fail to create maximum impact across a sales force and process.

Another critical mistake inside sales leaders make with their sales contests is running the same ones over and over again. And managers wonder why they see diminishing returns from their incentives over time?

Of course, the result of running the same competitions with the same format repeatedly creates a gradual decrease in output. Reps become jaded, the same winners tend to emerge each time, and the overall excitement around each new sales contest dies down more and more quickly.

The good news for inside sales teams is that the opportunities to improve your sales contest effectiveness are better than ever before. Inside sales teams tend to follow a more repetitive daily sales process and be more reliant on sales technologies like CRMs and phone systems.

Our findings are that prizes/ benefits/ or incentives are great - but the most beneficial reward for competitions is recognition. Reps are grinding day in and day out not to win a prize - but to be successful and garner attention/ future career growth. Give them that attention.

Run Revenue-Driving Sales Contests on Ambition

Ambition is a sales management platform that syncs every sales organization department, data source, and performance metric on one easy system.

Ambition clarifies and publicizes real-time performance analytics for your entire sales organization. Using a drag-and-drop interface, non-technical sales leaders can build custom scorecards, contests, reports, and TVs.

Ambition is endorsed by Harvard Business Review, AA-ISP (the Global Inside Sales Organization), and USA Today as a proven solution for managing millennial sales teams. Hear from our customers below.

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