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A sales contest is a great way to motivate your team. Here are some of the best ideas for contests that can help you win more deals and increase profits in 2022.
A sales contest uses competition and awards to encourage sales teams while encouraging desired behaviors, such as completing a specific number of cold calls or closing a certain proportion of transactions. We’ve included 11 sales contest ideas for you to consider, along with explanations of how they might help you meet your team’s objectives.
1. Hold a laser-focused sales competition.
The simplest approach to organize a sales contest is to base it on total sales or sales income, such as a special contest based on new client acquisition. Additionally, increasing income from add-on items or warranties is typically helpful since it encourages your sales force to participate more and better over time.
Heather Simmons discovered this when she held a contest for her Two Men and a Truck business in Madison, Wisconsin:
“In addition to our major service, which is moving, we provide boxes and packing services as a moving business,” Simmons added. “We observed the proportion of our sales in this sector increase after using sales competitions aimed at increasing sales of our boxes and packing services.” Even better, she said, “they’ve been at that level ever since.”
Why Does It Work?
Simmons urged her staff to provide these extra items by focusing on a particular area of concentration (in this example, boxes, and packing services), which they may have overlooked or overlooked while they concentrated on selling their primary products and services. As a consequence, her team devised tactics to boost their box and packing upsells, as well as their moving services, and the behaviors persisted long after the competition had concluded.
In comparison, in a general revenue competition, salesmen compete for the most sales. While some may acquire new tactics, others may just work longer hours to increase their earnings. They’ll return to their regular schedule after the contest is complete, and sales will usually level out.
How to Keep Track of It
Sales dashboard on Pipedrive
You may produce statistics displaying income by product or product category and compare sales of individual representatives on your sales team if your sales team utilizes a customer relationship management (CRM) system like Pipedrive to track transactions. You can store your items in the CRM and generate visual reports to share with your team by turning your data table into a graphic.
2. Hold a Milestone Sales Competition
When a handful of your top-performing sales people go ahead of the pack, the rest of your sales team loses interest as they fall farther behind. Conduct a milestone sales contest to spice things up and interest all of your salespeople. Anyone who hits a specified number or cash amount in sales in a certain time period earns a reward.
Why Does It Work?
A milestone sales contest is ideal for inspiring your whole team, even if it doesn’t push your top salesmen as hard as a typical sales challenge. Not only are more individuals rewarded and pushed to do their best work, but allowing some competition ensures that there will be some long-term excitement. If you still want to motivate your best salespeople, try conducting a hybrid contest that includes a top sales category.
How to Keep Track of It
Most CRMs let you keep track of which sales prospects you won and how much money they brought in over time. You can design reports for each member of your sales team in Pipedrive, for example, to include the income they produced over a particular time period, making it simple to monitor for your contest.
3. Create a sales contest based on effort.
Another inventive strategy to make your competitions more inclusive is to emphasize effort rather than results. Dan McGraw, the founder and CEO of Fuelzee, experimented with this method by paying his salespeople even when they lost a contract.
“We logged every ‘no’ in our system, and the individual with the most no’s earned a $100 gift card every week,” he stated. “It may seem ridiculous, but when it comes to sales, you get a lot of no’s.” You’re coming closer to receiving a ‘yes’ the more no’s you receive. You still want to get there because the reward of earning a yes is much greater than $100. Our outbound calls virtually increased as a result, and the whole staff was driven.”
Why Does It Work?
When new and seasoned salesmen are rewarded for effort rather than merely results, they are motivated to go above and beyond. Many people will go above and beyond to increase the amount of phone calls or other sales activities you reward, whether it means staying late, working through lunch, or reducing the time between calls.
It also aids in the motivation of new salesmen. In McGraw’s contest, a client’s result might be either favorable or negative. A “yes” may result in a larger commission check, but a “no” still results in a check being written and pays them for their hard work.
How to Keep Track of It
Dashboard deals won by Pipedrive
Your sales operations team may develop a report that displays the amount of opportunities lost, won, or delayed if your staff manage their leads in a CRM. Pipedrive, like other CRM systems, can display each salesperson’s win/loss rate, or the proportion of deals won vs opportunities lost.
4. Host a “Loser” Sales Competition
Another method to keep everyone involved during a sales contest is to completely disregard the winner. GreenPal’s Bryan Clayton held a month-long sales competition in which his workers competed to sign up the fewest new suppliers.
Each week’s loser had to put $20 towards the company’s Christmas party fund. “This year, we got up to a fairly substantial pot,” Bryan added, “so needless to say, we had the finest Christmas party to date this year.” “You’d be surprised how much fun this makes the daily grind since we fight to win, and everyone wins in the end.”
Why Does It Work?
In most cases, “punishing” the loser would be unacceptable, but the Christmas party fund makes it humorous and enjoyable. Clayton also doesn’t always “pick out” poor salespeople since it focuses on a particular goal (new supplier sign-ups) rather than overall sales income.
How to Keep Track of It
Though it depends on the data you’re monitoring, most CRMs should be able to simply provide these figures. However, some databases are simpler to access than others. You may utilize Pipedrive’s built-in reports, such as sales trends over the previous 90 days or sales velocity, or you can create your own for sales of a certain product, win/loss rate, and more.
5. Organize a daily sales competition
When planning your sales contest, think about how long you want it to last and how often you’ll update the score. Most sales competitions last a month to provide salespeople adequate time to adapt and work toward their objectives. Month-long competitions, on the other hand, run the danger of becoming stale. If the contest outcomes seem to be so far away, sales representatives may forget or lose interest.
Why Does It Work?
Daily sales competitions are effective because they keep you front of mind and seem more reachable since you receive immediate feedback rather than waiting a month or quarter. It divides the time period into small chunks and keeps the sales staff focused on completing deals every day. It also allows salespeople with varying degrees of skill or expertise to compete.
How to Keep Track of It
Set a deadline for each day, and any sales made after that will be added to the following day’s total. Gather your team and invite everyone to share their daily sales totals when the time comes. Again, a CRM like Pipedrive makes it simple to monitor and check the outcomes.
6. Provide Prizes for Experiential Learning
Many salesmen prefer monetary incentives and awards, while others choose experiences above money. Non-cash awards, including as gift cards, additional paid time off, and public recognition, may be used to reward and inspire your staff.
Why Does It Work?
Because everybody participating in sales management efforts, even if they are in a supporting function, may participate in sales contests, rewarding your team with experiences can be a terrific way to connect with sales contest winners. They may be a pleasant way to get to know your sales staff and personally thank them for their hard work.
How to Keep Track of It
This sales contest concept involves employing a different incentive technique than traditional cash and prizes, and instead rewarding employees with experiences and training. The simplest approach to monitor this is to organize a contest and compare the results to those of previous, more conventional sales competitions you’ve had. You may also compare the performance of two sales contests—one with a typical cash award and the other with experiential or training-based incentives.
7. Hold a behavior-based sales competition
There are often important behaviors that you want your sales people to exhibit on a regular basis. Planning and implementing a behavior-focused sales contest might encourage people to engage in specific activities on a regular basis by rewarding them.
Using incentives, entertaining games, and awards to encourage good sales actions or behaviors helps the sales person link happy sensations with the sales activity. This form of sales challenge, if conducted long enough, may result in long-term behavior modification.
Why Does It Work?
Sales competitions that are based on behavior work because they teach and encourage individuals to participate in new or neglected activities that may lead to higher sales. These revenue-generating actions may become everyday routines that lead to greater sales if the contest goes long enough and there is training or sharing of best practices while the contest is running.
How to Keep Track of It
Using a CRM that tracks behavior is one of the best methods to monitor this sort of transaction. For example, if you want your sales staff to spend more time talking to prospects and ask certain qualifying questions, a CRM with a built-in phone with recording facilities that records conversation duration will provide you with the data you need to conduct this sort of contest.
8. Make a sales contest based on an event.
Making your sales competitions based on current events may be entertaining. This keeps the contest fresh in people’s minds. You may use any sort of event, such as a weekday, a season (such as summer or spring), or a sports event (such as the Super Bowl).
Why Does It Work?
Current events may be used to re-ignite existing momentum. Why not take advantage of the excitement around the debut of a new film or a major event? If your budget permits, you might base the rewards on the occasion, such as movie tickets or sports event tickets. If your budget is limited, you may make awards depending on the occasion.
How to Keep Track of It
The sort of event you pick and how you conduct this type of sales contest will determine how you track it. You may construct and extract data based on that day of the week and monitor sales or sales activity before and after the contest, for example, if you’re basing the contest on a day of the week when sales or efforts are normally low. This is simple with a CRM like Pipedrive, which enables you to generate sales reports for whatever time period you need.
9. Hold a sales contest for public recognition.
Some individuals are not driven only by money or experiences. They want for attention from the public. They like being the center of attention and on stage, particularly when it comes to their sales accomplishments. A low-cost strategy to motivate your team is to hold a public recognition contest.
Why Does It Work?
This style of sales competition works because it instills a competitive spirit in sales agents and allows them to see their progress in real time. It also works because some salesmen love receiving public praise and acclaim—it fulfills their fundamental desire for importance.
How to Keep Track of It
Use sales reports to monitor which salespeople closed the most transactions on a daily basis and over the course of the month (or whatever time period you’re measuring) for this sort of sales competition. You may compare this sort of sales contest to previous sales competitions you’ve done and conduct a poll to find out what your sales staff thinks about it to measure its efficacy.
10. Create a team-based sales competition
A team-based sales contest is one of the most effective strategies to boost sales and involve your whole team. Team-based competitions enable sales teams to compete against other sales teams while also allowing them to collaborate to achieve a common objective. If you just have one sales team, team-based competitions may be effective if you assign each member of the team a single target to achieve or divide the team in half during the contest.
Why Does It Work?
This sales competition works because teams collaborate rather than compete, and they are more likely to support one another so that everyone wins. If a regulation exists that demands a minimum sales contribution from each individual sales rep in order for anybody to qualify, more experienced and successful sales representatives will assist lower-performing or newer reps.
How to Keep Track of It
Use sales reports to monitor which teams complete the most transactions or participate in the targeted sales activity the most in team-based sales competitions. For example, if you want to have a team contest based on the most qualifying sales calls made by each team, you might use a CRM like Pipedrive, which has a built-in phone that allows you to log calls by team or area.
11. Hold a sales contest for lead generation.
Incentivizing lead creation is a terrific method to expand your pipeline. These might be fresh leads from current accounts or new leads from companies with whom you haven’t yet engaged. As an incentive, you may provide gift cards or tickets to a special event to the lead generator who generates the most leads.
Why Does It Work?
This form of sales competition works because maintaining a strong pipeline of fresh leads and contacts protects current clients while also generating new revenue. From the standpoint of a sales competition, it succeeds because it emphasizes and rewards the onerous process of prospecting for new business.
How to Keep Track of It
Reports that reflect the amount of new accounts and opportunities help you keep track of lead generating competitions. Pipedrive and other CRMs enable you to generate reports that illustrate the number of leads and opportunities generated. You may export your contacts and utilize the data to determine the winners in Pipedrive if you’re hosting a contact building contest with the purpose of increasing the number of contacts inside accounts.
Conclusion
You may employ a variety of sales competitions to encourage and inspire your sales staff. Your sales culture, the objectives you’re aiming to accomplish, your budget, and your capacity to monitor its efficacy will all influence the sort of sales contest you pick. This collection of 11 sales contest ideas is a great place to start when planning your own.
You can keep your sales staff engaged by allowing them to see their progress toward targets in real time, in addition to organizing competitions. Pipedrive, for example, may assist by making it simple to monitor individual performance using built-in sales reports that track outcomes.
