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Looking to run your most effective sales contest ever? Ambition has helped thousands of companies do just that. Here are the three keys to success plus ten great resources for sales leaders.
The dreaded summer slump is here, and many sales leaders are looking for innovative ways to keep their teams inspired and motivated.
Ambition has helped hundreds of companies run effective and interactive sales competitions - complete with TV leaderboards, Team vs Team settings, and Fantasy Football-style scoring. We take your paper process or manual reporting and make it digital. Save time, get results, and drive real engagement... without the headaches.
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Of the thousands of contests our clients have run, here are three keys to making your sales contests successful:
1. Focusing on incentivizing the right metrics
The first step is to focus on an outcome that you are wanting to achieve, and tying behaviors to that outcomes that drive revenue. Those behaviors should consist of a metric, benchmark, and weight that goes towards a scorecard for each and every rep. Once you have a clear understanding of its the outcomes, you can drive the performance curve and set the sales pace.
The number one reason sales contests go astray is misaligned metrics. Sales contests should revolve around true KPIs (operative word: key). The key to success is often measuring metrics from the entire sales process, weighting them according to importance. Sales KPIs help you evaluate where your team stands on core metrics and how individual members can improve their game. For managers, KPIs provide the required data in making the right tactical and strategic decisions.
2. Ditch your paper process
The days of printing out a leaderboard once a day and posting it over the watercooler are over. Not only is compiling results on paper a operational headache and a time consuming process, its all boring. Your employee's spend hours playing fantasy football on modern technology platforms like ESPN or Yahoo, and are used to real time updates and mobile access. An engaging platform, sales visibility and contests standings are a critical part of sales contest effectiveness.
Ambition leaderboards are just one layer of motivation that makes it easy to bring visibility to the forefront of your Sales contests. Reps are competitive (hopefully) and get engaged by seeing where they stand versus their peers. You want to see lift in activity volume, so your contest visibility is major key to success. Mixing in daily activities (phone calls, emails, etc.) to your standard leaderboards give reps and management extra insight into performance, and really helps your sales contest move the needle.
3. Create A Coachable path to success
Reps crave a clear path to success and want to be recognized for their hard work, and sales contests provide great coaching and career development oppurtunities. By celebrating and publicizing improvement within your sales team, you place reps on an even playing field and increase your ability to move the middle 70% of performers.
This particular problem is the most chronic issue with modern sales contests - and also the hardest to solve. Straightforward leaderboards and single-metric contests that involve standard-issue KPIs like revenue, calls made, and such often end up spotlighting the same few top performers over and over again.
One way to solve this problem, says the Harvard Business Review, is to run a team sales competition. According to their analysis of a three-month sales contest run by Clayton Homes, putting reps on teams helped spur sales team buy-in and peer-to-peer coaching.
Setting contest wide goals around driving activity and engagment, increasing the pace has have been found to change the behavior of low performers. The outcome of a successfully run sales contest will be a shift in the overall performance of the sales org. What we call an agile sales organization - the curve trends upward as everyone ups their game and level of performance.
Contests are a fun way to drive productivity, production and build a culture of accountability and coaching within your team. The more seriously you take the contest, the more seriously your reps will take them.
The Top 10 Resources for Building Sales Contests
To supplement this post, we highly recommend checking out these 10 resources for more great insights and ideas on how to build your best sales competition.
- The Sales Director Who Turned Work Into Fantasy Sports
- 11 Creative Sales Contest Ideas (And Why They Work)
- Finding the Right Sales Contest Software
- 5 Sales Competition Ideas for SDR Teams
- The Winner’s Guide to Effective Sales Contests
- How Fantasy Football Can Drive Sales Team Productivity
- The 7 Most Epic Sales Contests Run By Our Clients
- How to Use Contests to Inspire Your Millennial Workforce
- The Top 10 Best Practices for Sales Leaderboards
- Proven Returns With Gamification: A Kenco Use Study
Ambition: The Leader in Sales Contest Software
Ambition is a sales management platform that syncs every department, data source, and performance metric in your organization on one system. Ambition's drag-and-drop interface lets non-technical sales leaders create custom scorecards, sales contests, reports, and TVs to drive results.
Ambition is endorsed by Harvard Business Review, AA-ISP (the Global Inside Sales Organization), and USA Today as a proven solution for increasing sales team recognition opportunities.
Contact us to learn how Ambition can impact your sales organization today.
