Creating Incentives For Your Sales Team

Incentives are an important part of motivating any sales team to reach their potential. Incentives themselves are relatively well-known, and can include things like money, prizes, recognition, and other motivational encouragement. Therefore, it is worth examining four of the more important sales team qualities, which should be reinforced by incentives:
Encouraging targeted efforts Much of the frustration in sales efforts can often be avoided through intelligent pre-sales planning. By recognizing prospects "hot button" issues, as well as exactly how your products and services will alleviate these issues, your sales team can work both more efficiently and effectively by only addressing qualified prospects. Your sales force should also act as the front line in intelligence gathering for marketing efforts--identifying unmet prospect needs can then be the basis for the development of future products and services. Profit sharing can be one incentive used to ensure that efforts are focused on meeting and exceeding both current and future customer demands, and not just on short-term results. Encouraging proven skills Some sales skills are truly timeless, such as preventing objections (or handling them if they still occur). Developing incentives for sales team members who come up with especially effective objection handling or other sales techniques is recommended, since these methods will help all of your sales force win sales repeatedly in the future. Incentives can also be used to reward those who consistently implement proven sales skills, instead of approaching opportunities haphazardly. Encouraging best practices Within your own industry, there will be sometimes be idiosyncrasies when calling on particular clients. As one example, perhaps calling during the weekend can help your team contact an important decision maker. Recognizing these patterns, and encouraging your sales team to share this business knowledge with each other can often improve sales results for the entire group. It can be beneficial to create special incentives for members who provide this knowledge, particularly since job security concerns might otherwise prevent sharing of specialized business knowledge. Encouraging solid efforts In many cases, and particularly for low dollar value products and services, the results from sales efforts are a numbers game. The more qualified prospects you contact, the more appointments you can make, resulting in more selling opportunities. If the sales force has targeted their efforts properly, is using proven skills, and has also adopted best practices, then consistent effort may be the only piece of the puzzle that is missing. Including incentives for hard work may be the difference between achieving sales goals or not.

In short, by encouraging carefully targeted efforts, using proven skills, developing best practices, and giving a solid effort, most sales teams will have all the incentive needed to perform well. This in turn is critically important for driving top-line revenues, and ultimately, increasing profits.

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Copyright 2010, by Marc Mays

Creating Incentives For Your Sales Team

Marc Mays is the creator of http://www.myplatinumparachute.com/, which helps first-time small business owners obtain the critical skills needed for their small business success.