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Looking to run better sales team contests? Ambition COO and Winner's Guide to Running Effective Sales Contests co-author Brian Trautschold shows how.
The qualities of highly motivational inside sales contests are very simple, but can be tricky to implement. Let's break them down.
Sales Team Contests: Best Practices
A good contest for any sales team accomplishes 2 goals:
- Drives key behaviors and improves rep effectiveness and focus.
- Engages reps creating buzz, fueling energy and building culture.
Those are your goals. Here's what it takes to hit them.
Let's work backwards backwards and find out how you engage your entire team and get them focused on the right activities. Best practices include team-based contests or competitions where the winning metrics are an overall performance score or percentage-to-goal(s).
These contests contrast with strictly revenue-based competitions. In the latter, the same 10-15% of the sales team always wins, disengaging the other 85%.
Align the organizational goals and metrics in question with your company strategy. If you are blowing out this quarter in terms of revenue, but looking at the pipeline for next quarter has you sweating - run a contest that increases future opportunities or focuses on lead conversion rate.
Make sure your team understands why you're setting the goals and how their effort is contributing to the strategy (transparency is powerful! Communicate, recognize top performers, and keep things updated. If the competition standings only live in an excel file on your computer, I promise people will lose interest or forget.
Your reps need to know where they stand, how they're doing, and what they can do to effect their outcome. Try to make the data as accessible as possible and make a point to recognize the reps who are exceeding expectations.
Lastly, have fun - but don't be silly. People love fun. They don't love pressure. And they don't want to be patronized. If you're running a contest - with clearly aligned goals, wide engagement, and lots of recognition - you'll be thrilled with the results. The reality is that process (while simple on paper) can be a lot of work.
At Ambition, we help the most dynamic sales organizations not only drive sales productivity via advanced analytics and goal management - but we make running contests incredibly easy and drastically more effective. Best of luck to your sales team. Feel free to tweet me your thoughts at @btrautschold.
Ambition: Hold Reps Accountable to Sales Performance
Ambition is a sales management platform that syncs business teams, data sources, and performance metrics on one system.
Modern sales leaders use Ambition to enhance sales performance insights and run supercharged sales reports, scorecards, contests, and TVs via drag-and-drop interface.
Ambition is endorsed by Harvard Business Review and AA-ISP (the Global Inside Sales Organization). Hear more from business leaders who use Ambition in their organization.
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- FiveStars: Adam Wall. Sr. Manager of Sales Operations .
- Filemaker: Brad Freitag. Vice-President of Worldwide Sales.
- Outreach: Mark Kosoglow. Vice-President of Sales.
- Cell Marque: Lauren Hopson. Director of Sales & Marketing.
- Access America Transport: Ted Alling. Chief Executive Officer.
Watch Product Walkthroughs:
- ChowNow. Led by Vice-President of Sales, Drew Woodcock.
- Outreach. Led by Sales Development Manager, Alex Lynn.
- AMX Logistics. Led by Executive Vice-President ,Jared Moore.
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- Clayton Homes: HBR finds triple-digit growth in 3 sales efficiency metrics.
- Coyote Logistics: Monthly revenue per broker grew $525 in 6 months.
- Peek: Monthly sales activity volume grew 142% in 6 months.
- Vorsight: Monthly sales conversations grew 300% in 6 months.
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