2 steps to boost sales performance all year round
Ensuring team motivation is a key factor in achieving sales targets at the end of the year. Two solutions are available to sales managers and supervisors: on the one hand, the organization of challenges, and on the other, day-to-day motivation.
In this article, we'll be taking a closer look at what is meant by "sales performance management", a well-known term that is all too often confused with challenges. And yet, apart from organizing challenges, animating sales performance is a very good way of maintaining motivation and commitment throughout the year.
Introduction - why animation?
- Creating commitment over time
The aim of sales animation is to create commitment on a daily basis throughout the year, to help each sales rep achieve his or her objectives.
The impact of animation is illustrated in the diagram below. Animation creates commitment over time. The quality of the animation will result in a higher level of commitment.
- Engage all year round ≠ organize challenges
From the graph, it's clear that challenges are part of the animation; the biggest commitment peaks occur at the time of the challenges. However, corporate challenges are not enough.
It's also important to animate outside challenge periods, so as not to risk losing commitment. In this context, the "ideal" animation takes into account two aspects of sales strategy:
- Long-term objectives (quarterly and annual)
- Create special moments to break the routine and respond to opportunities (seasonality, catching up on a target, launching a campaign for a specific product...).
Step 1: select sales promotion KPIs
The principle of repeatability
Before diving into the choice of indicators, there's a fundamental concept to understand if you want to set up a truly effective animation. This notion is the repeatability of feedback. Commitment is created by progress on a performance indicator. And to highlight this progress, you need to produce feedback for the sales person.
This system is summarized in the diagram below: Action → Feedback → Motivation
And a little more concretely: Sale of a product → achievement of weekly goal (visualization of goal, ranking, reward, notifications...) → Motivation
It's the chain of feedback loops that creates short-term commitment to long-term goals.
How do you choose your strategic indicators?
To create functional feedback loops, it's important to choose the performance indicators on which the animation is based.
Here are a few criteria to help you choose the right indicators:
- Business stakes: indicators are used to measure progress towards corporate objectives, such as annual targets.
- Link with remuneration: employees must understand that they are getting closer to additional remuneration (bonuses, gifts...) by making progress on animated KPIs.
- Encourages progress: indicators can easily be improved to keep you motivated all year round.
- Update frequency: new performance data is available every week, ideally every day.
- Generates emulation: indicators are meaningful and results are expected by the whole team (see example in next paragraph).
- Limited number: the animation focuses on a limited number of strategic indicators.
Choosing a strategic indicator: a practical example
Every evening at 7pm, one of our customers sends his 150 sales reps an email summarizing the value of each of their orders, along with a ranking.
According to the sales team, this e-mail "drives them crazy". This unique order-taking indicator not only generates emulation, but also makes sense, as it is directly linked to sales reps' remuneration. Its daily publication frequency also makes it very interesting for sales promotion, since it's easy to compare results from one day to the next in order to identify the best progress or top performers, for example.
Three points can be made about this indicator and the associated animation. Firstly, there's nothing to be gained from ranking, as remuneration is linked solely to sales achieved by sales reps. Secondly, the sales cycle is short: sales reps book orders every day. Thirdly, we can see that a single indicator is enough to create a relevant animation.
This indicator provides an excellent basis for animation. In the next section, we'll take a look at how to create this animation.
Step 2: create a sales event using motivation and gamification levers
Reminder of motivational levers
We've already talked a lot about motivational levers on this blog, particularly for sales challenges. But if you want to engage your staff all year round, you can also activate them for the day-to-day management of strategic performance indicators.
Here are the 4 main motivational levers:
- Rewards: gifts, bonuses, gift vouchers...
- Competition: need to measure up to others.
- Cooperation: the need to achieve common goals.
- Accomplishment: the need to progress and excel.
How can you make concrete use of these levers in your sales promotion?
As we saw in the first part of this article, engagement is generated by feedback. To reinforce the effectiveness of feedback, we can combine it with a motivational lever: this is the principle of gamification.
Here are a few examples of feedback statistics that can be associated with an indicator.
Let's take the daily order intake indicator we met earlier. Based on this single indicator, we can imagine numerous statistics to drive team performance: reaching the target, personal record for the year, progress, TOP 10%, best performance of the year, best collective performance of the year. All these indicators are easily calculated and displayed on a gamification platform.
How can badges be used to boost sales performance?
Badges are one of the best-known gamification techniques. They are virtual trophies that recognize the achievements of individuals. Badges have a symbolic value greater than mere statistics, and also serve to distinguish oneself in the eyes of the employee community.
Here are some examples of badges defined using the statistics in the previous table.
- Personal best: "you've broken your order-taking record".
- Personal progress: "You have taken 20% more orders than last month".
- Record of the year: "Congratulations, you have achieved the highest order intake of the day".
Often, gamification tools allow badges to be centralized on a user profile; managers and colleagues can see the trophies earned and deduce the salesperson's strong points.
Badges also have the advantage of creating a strong storytelling for the animation program. They can even be used to personalize original rewardssuch as t-shirts, caps or mugs. These goodies can be sent automatically to the employee when he or she wins a badge.
Celebrating performance
Even if statistics and badges are feedbacks sent automatically to employees, they should not replace human recognition and social feedback. Here are a few ideas on how to give the human element its rightful place in animation:
- Post a message on a news feed when an employee breaks a sales record.
- Make an announcement on company chat (Teams, Slack...) when a sales milestone has been reached collectively.
- Send out a monthly newsletter to highlight the performances achieved individually or collectively by the various team members.
Conclusion
To reach sales targets at the end of the year, you need to motivate your teams on a daily basis. There are two important steps to effective motivation:
- carefully select the strategic indicators that will serve as the basis for the animation.
- communicating performance in a way that highlights the different motivational drivers.
To go one step further and create the ideal event, you'll need to create special moments, often with the help of one-off challenges. If you can't find the inspiration for your next corporate challenge, take a look at our article 14 challenge ideas.
And to find out more about day-to-day animation, watch our webinar with our customer Jawad Nourdine, MGEN Development Manager.
