Motivating salespeople to sell more of the right products at the right time can be a challenging, not to mention expensive exercise. It requires careful planning and organization to achieve positive results and a good return on investment. However, there are tools available to make this process easier, such as online tactical channel incentive programs.
Channel marketers can maximize sales partner engagement by deploying the targets, trackers and themes incorporated in tools like these and, ultimately, obtain the desired results while having a lot of fun. Here are some key points for your sales incentive programs.
Motivation through competition
Salespeople need motivation and, whilst a rewards and incentives program is an ideal route to this, you might need to offer a bit of encouragement to get them started.
- Offering desirable prizes is one thing, but sales staff respond extremely well to a bit of healthy competition.
- Setting clear and achievable targets during a promotion creates focus and excitement. This in turn boosts engagement and has an immediate impact on seller behavior.
- How you choose to create the spirit of competition is up to you and can be driven by your rewards program.
Set the target
Incentive platforms that feature a points-based banking system make it easy to set targets, which drive enthusiasm across the board.
- If participants know that each individual’s efforts will be rewarded incrementally, they will be more motivated to pursue every sale, rather than being demotivated by targets they perceive as too high.
- You can set your incentive platform to log (and recognize) each sale at various milestones as the campaign progresses; for example, seller of the day / week, number of sales versus value of sales. This approach will also facilitate easy measurement of the effectiveness of your promotion and report on its achievements, as points can be easily logged and totted up.
- Consider team awards that share the accolades when targets are achieved.
Incorporating a tactical theme or topic
Featuring a theme within a tactical channel incentive program can also generate interest, be it short term or run for a longer period.
- For example, if your promotion is wrapped around a themed reward like Christmas, a key calendar date, sporting event or a play on your brand or product, you can maintain interest over a sustained period of time as the interim topics and rewards shift.
- Make sure you determine and communicate timescales from the beginning of each new project, as it will set the pace for your sales people and affect how long they have to accrue points towards their goal.
- A good technology-based rewards and incentives tool will keep theme-based campaigns cost-effective – all you need to do is update your dashboard design in line with each new topic.
Measuring results to prove success
To be sure that your sales incentive program is having the desired effect, it’s important to be able to measure results.
- Tracking should be a two-way function, so that sales people are also empowered to check how they are doing. The checking itself is a measure of engagement, and also allows you to motivate them further every time participants log on, whether educating them about the product, reminding them of key objectives, or simply providing encouragement.
End to end solution
Lastly, your channel incentives and rewards tool should be able to handle a promotion from start to finish, including how sales equate to the points banked by each sales partner.
- How you decide to collect and present this data is a matter of choice and there are options to suit every business. You might prefer a user-friendly league table that is updated daily or weekly, or an automated feed that updates in real time or even a combination of the two.
- However, your system manages the data, it should be efficient and transparent, so that sales people can submit leads and managers can verify the conversion, streamlining the process to save time and effort.
- For your program to motivate, it needs to be accessible from all sides, so that salespeople can easily see how they are doing, and data is readily available for managers to download use for reporting and rewarding.
Helping you make the most of your incentives and rewards
A rewards tool should fit neatly into your business model and work with your processes and targets to minimize effort and maximize results. The right platform will make sales incentive programs easy and successful. The technology is available, you just need to make it work for you.
Learn how the 360insights The Channel Success Platform and Points-Based Reward Incentives Module could be the right platform partner for your business. Book a demo with our team to learn more.
