Need to revitalize your sales team this holiday season? Here are 8 rewards categories to incentivize your team:
- Gift of time: Give employees a full day off, or even a half day, extended lunch break, or allow them to sleep in a little later on morning. There’s a cost to an employee being out for any period of time, but chances are they will return to the job refreshed and ready to get back to work.
- Gift of convenience: Offer your employee the prime parking spot
- Gift of excitement: Scratch Offs, lottery tickets, gift cards to their favorite coffee or lunch spot
- Gift of food: Provide a pizza party or catered lunch
- Gift of Comfort: Have a relaxed dress code for the day or week
- Gift of relaxation: Give your employees a gift certificate for a spa experience, cleaning service (maid service, dry cleaning service, car wash), or a meal delivery service
- Gift of one on one time with management: Taken out to lunch by the C-suite or CEO. Studies show that being appreciated by their superiors and getting recognized can strongly boost a sales person’s motivation
- Gif of Job-related incentives:
- Offer your employee an upgraded laptop, upgraded work cell phone
- Allow them to pilot a new sales tool, and if it works expand it to the rest of the team
Remember not all sales people are motivated the same way. Consequently, not all sales incentive programs work for all companies.
Typically, the sales incentive is only geared towards 80% of the salesforce. In a perfect world, the other 20% are self-motivated and already are the top sales people.
Often, sales incentive programs will fail when they become too complex to complete easily. If sales people are going to have difficulty recording their sales or redeeming them, the program becomes a disincentive
Keep the program as simple as possible for best results. Educating your salespeople to understand the value of the incentives and how to utilize them will cut down on confusion.
Also remember to keep the rewards coming! Any reward-value can become an unmotivated, anticlimactic activity if the time span between winning and getting the reward is too long.
