14 ideas for effective sales challenges
What is a sales challenge?
The role of sales challenges in sales promotion
The sales challenge is part of a year-round sales drive designed to help employees achieve their objectives.
The role of the sales challenge is to create a high point: a moment of strong commitment, lasting between one and four weeks.
Challenges are therefore an essential part of sales promotion.
Performance indicators and challenge objectives
A challenge is always organized around one or more performance indicators.
There are two types:
- resource indicators (number of appointments booked, number of calls made, etc.)
- performance indicators (sales, number of sales, etc.)
The choice of one or other type of indicator depends on the sector. One of the advantages of this type of animation is that it enables flexible management of the business according to need.
For activities with short sales cycles, we give priority to results indicators. For example :
- Organize a challenge before the end of the quarter to reach sales targets.
- Boost sales of a new product when it is released.
For these activities, input indicators are used for steering purposes, in addition to output indicators.
For activities with long sales cycles, we prefer to use average indicators. For example :
- Number of calls made
- Number of appointments obtained
Once the indicators and objectives have been defined, all that remains is to choose the mechanics of the challenge.
Choosing the mechanics of a sales challenge: motivational levers
The choice of challenge mechanics is essential for two reasons.
- originality: the challenge creates commitment partly because it breaks the routine of day-to-day operations. The more original the challenge, the more likely it is to create surprise and therefore commitment.
- motivation: the challenge mechanism determines the motivational levers activated. The 3 main motivational levers to be activated through challenges are competition, cooperation and achievement.
3 ideas for a traditional sales challenge
Podium Challenge
This is the classic competitive challenge. It rewards the X best employees or teams. Advantage: effective for creating emulation between the best performers.
Disadvantage: can quickly discourage the less successful.
Example: the three participants with the highest sales over a one-month period win the challenge.
Challenge by reaching individual objectives
This challenge rewards participants who achieve the required objective, thus activating the achievement lever.
Advantage: effective for including all participants. The ambition of the challenge can easily be modulated by modifying the objective to be reached.
Disadvantage: limited social emulation.
Example: each participant who achieves at least €1,000 in sales during the challenge period wins a gift voucher.
Inter-team challenge
This is the classic cooperative challenge. It pits teams against each other within the company.
Advantage: activates the lever of cooperation while retaining a dose of competition. Competition is more or less accepted, depending on the corporate culture. This type of challenge enables it to be introduced gradually.
Disadvantage: less individual stimulation. This can be remedied through long-term animation (individual objectives, badges, levels).
Example: the five best teams in the region on the CA indicator win a reward.
11 ideas for an original sales challenge
Challenge Paliers
Each performance level is associated with a reward or benefit. For example, selling 10 products = 10 points; selling 20 products = 40 points.
Advantage: progressively engages the participant with increasingly difficult levels to reach. Good combination of accessibility for beginners (for the first levels) and goals of excellence (for the last levels).
Disadvantage: requires a large budget if you don't want to dilute the reward. You can also offer virtual rewards (badges) for the first levels to avoid this limit.
Example: participants who make 10, 20 or 30 sales win gift vouchers worth €50, €150 and €300.
Challenge Max score
Participants are rewarded in proportion to their performance. For example, 1 product sold = 1 point.
Advantage: encourages regularity. Every effort or result is rewarded.
Disadvantage: doesn't encourage you to push yourself to reach the next level.
Example: €10 gain for each appointment with a prospect.
Challenge Course
The first X participants to reach the target win the challenge.
Advantage: everyone is "into it" from the very first hours of the challenge.
Disadvantage: can be discouraging for people who get behind quickly. For this reason, we recommend organizing short "race" challenges.
Example: the first employee or team to sell the new offer wins a reward.
Challenge Loterie
Each sale earns a lottery ticket. The lottery allows you to win gifts.
Advantage: every participant makes an effort, thanks to the prospect of a significant payoff, even in the case of average performance.
Disadvantage: can be perceived as unfair. This can be mitigated by making participation in the draw conditional on a minimum number of sales.
Example: throughout the year, achieving sales targets earns lottery tickets. 90% = 1 ticket, 95% = 2 tickets, 100% = 3 tickets, 110% = 8 tickets. The draw is made at the end of the year.
Challenge Hasard
Points are earned randomly when a sale is made.
Advantage: increases the fun through the random dimension of winning points. Reduces the anxiety-inducing dimension of a competitive challenge.
Disadvantage: can be perceived as very unfair by the best participants. For this type of challenge, no material rewards are provided. To be used for short challenges (one day) and rather to animate indicators of means.
Example: getting 10 prospect appointments randomly earns 1, 2 or 3 points, enabling you to take part in a ranking.
Highly competitive challenges
Here are a few examples of highly competitive sales challenges. They all have the disadvantage of being highly competitive and therefore potentially exclusionary. Nonetheless, they do generate a high level of employee commitment. They can therefore be organized when team performance is homogeneous. On the other hand, each of these challenges has a cooperative version in the event of a confrontation between teams. In this case, the competitive dimension is also better accepted.
Challenge Duel
Participants compete against each other randomly over a given period, using an indicator.
Advantage: every day is a new challenge with a new opponent.
Disadvantage: discouraging for those who accumulate defeats.
Example: a duel based on the number of sales for the day. Each duel won earns X points, which are entered into a ranking. The top X finishers win a prize.
Challenge Tournament
Participants compete in a table through the round of 16, round of 8 and so on.
Advantage: excellent mechanics to create excitement and animation throughout the tournament.
Disadvantage: excluding participants eliminated early in the game.
Example: a draw determines the opponents. Each round of the tournament takes place over one week. At the end of the week, the participant with the highest turnover wins the opposition and moves on to the next round.
Challenge Battle Royal (leaderboard and countdown)
Battle Royal consists of progressively eliminating participants. In the "ranking" version, the X lowest-placed participants are eliminated each day. In the "countdown" version, a target is set for each period. Participants who fail to reach the target by the end of the period are eliminated. The level to be reached is progressively higher.
Benefit: creates a sense of urgency.
Disadvantage: excluding participants eliminated early in the game.
For example: each day, sales staff with a CRM data quality rate of less than 90% are eliminated. The challenge continues until there is only one participant left.
Cooperative challenges
Here are a few examples of team-based sales challenges to stimulate cooperation, a motivating factor sometimes neglected in favor of competition.
Random team challenge
In this challenge, the teams don't correspond to the classic company organization chart.
Advantage: breaks the routine, creates surprise. These challenges are also less stigmatizing for less well-placed teams.
Disadvantage: team logic can be more complex to develop, as team members don't always know each other.
For example, organize a challenge between pairs of newcomers and experienced employees.
Achieving team objectives
It's the collective version of the tier challenge. All members fight to achieve a common goal.
Advantage: the real challenge to activate cooperation. Encourages mutual aid and goodwill.
Disadvantage: it's hard to find a disadvantage to this type of challenge. But be sure to propose a sufficiently ambitious objective.
Example: obtain 100 lead appointments as a team in the course of one "one-two punch" day.
Challenge EPIQUE
Everyone in the company (or department) strives to achieve a common goal.
Benefit: creates meaning and a sense of belonging through the epic dimension of the goal.
Disadvantage: in this type of challenge, it can be complicated to find the right indicator to track. It has to make sense to everyone in the department.
Example: for its launch year, 1/3 of the market must have tested the new product.
Conclusion
This article has shown you a number of original and more traditional ways of organizing a sales challenge. The mechanics are one criterion of effectiveness, but there are many other parameters to take into account, such as the duration or frequency of the challenge.
To find out more, download our sales challenge guide below.
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