4 questions to organize the perfect sales challenge
There is no universal recipe for organizing an effective sales challenge. Designing an event involves taking into account a large number of criteria specific to the company, the employees, the products sold and the objectives pursued. In this article, we explore four fundamental questions for defining a relevant strategy to engage sales teams all year round and boost results.
Question 1: Why organize a sales challenge?
Before defining the details of your challenge, it's essential to understand why you want to set it up. What role does it play in your company's overall sales drive?
The main objective is to generate commitment and motivate your sales teams to achieve (or even exceed) their objectives. To achieve this, you need to succeed in creating an animation that maintains a sufficient degree of commitment over time, for all employees.
Traditionally, companies have used two main types of incentive: annual challenges and one-off challenges lasting a few weeks. We detail their advantages and limitations below.
The annual challenge: highlighting objectives
This format, generally structured around end-of-year objectives, offers high-value rewards that leave a lasting impression, such as trips or seminars for example. However, it has several limitations:
- Lack offeedback: by definition, an annual challenge rewards end-of-year objectives. The publication of intermediate results is often too far apart in time to enable effective animation (feedback frequency too low).
- Discouragement: often, the annual challenge rewards the "top performers", the best employees or teams. After only a few weeks of challenges, some participants are already aware that it will be very difficult for them to battle for the top places in the ranking, and therefore for the reward. In this context, the annual challenge simply fails to win over the vast majority of employees.
- Risk of monotony: Without continuous animation, this type of system can become tiresome for participants. Even if results are published with sufficient frequency, the same indicators are scrutinized week after week, with no source of motivation other than the year-end reward.
The one-off challenge: breaking the routine
Lasting from 1 to 4 weeks, this format is ideal for punctuating the year with regular animations. Here are its two main advantages and limitations:
- Apeak engagement: this format creates strong engagement around a specific objective. For example, catching up on annual targets, adapting to seasonality, capitalizing on the launch of a marketing campaign...
- Limited cost: unlike the annual challenge, it doesn't require a large rewards budget. One could even argue that the excitement and animation generated by a one-off challenge should take a back seat to the reward. The main strength of this challenge is to break the routine, and that's what makes it so motivating.
- The "soufflé" effect: the commitment generated by the challenge tends to diminish rapidly once it is over.
👉 Annual and one-off challenges complement each other, and are two interesting building blocks to integrate into an incentive strategy. The first helps to keep employees on track towards their annual objectives, while the second breaks the routine and boosts motivation. To complete the animation strategy, we can add a third brick, the "red thread" animation throughout the year. This does not involve challenges, but can include a follow-up of intermediate objectives, combined with rewards and feedback (badges, personalized notifications, rankings, etc.) to maintain a constant level of interest and commitment.
Question 2: What are the motivational levers for the challenge?
Challenges are often associated with rewards: rewards alone are supposed to motivate employees. But there are other ways of motivating employees. What's more, although rewards are highly effective, they also have their limitations:
- High cost: Material rewards represent a significant cost for the company. All the more so as they gradually generate habituation: you always need a little more reward to maintain the same level of commitment.
- Discouragement: Focusing only on the best means leaving out a large proportion of employees, especially those who are not among the top performers.
- Untapped reservoir of motivation: Limiting motivational techniques to rewards means overlooking all other levers, and thus depriving yourself of an interesting reservoir of additional motivation. In fact, motivational techniques generally work in synergy: using one will not affect the effectiveness of the other in most cases. For example, adding a personal goal (the achievement lever) to a scheme will not render the competition already underway uninteresting.
Typology of motivations
To design a balanced challenge, it is useful to diversify the motivational levers:
- Progression: the individual is motivated by the achievement of individual goals and personal fulfillment (beating a personal record, reaching an ambitious or new goal, etc.).
- Cooperation: the individual is motivated by achieving goals as part of a team and in cooperation.
- Competition: the individual is motivated by competition. He or she seeks performance in order to rank ahead of colleagues.
- Reward: the individual is motivated by material and financial reward.
The challenge set up can activate or deactivate these motivational levers. It is also possible to mix motivational levers. For example, a team has to achieve a certain number of sales. If the target is reached, the team wins the challenge; if not, the whole team loses. Unlike an inter-team challenge, in which several teams compete to be ranked (cooperation/competition mix), this type of challenge is purely cooperative (cooperation/achievement).
To discover other examples, see our article with 14 challenge ideas.
👉 Mixing motivational levers throughout the year makes it possible to engage all employees in the experience :
- because it allows us to satisfy all the personalities of our employees, who may have different tastes and be motivated by different types of levers.
- because it allows all employees to be involved, whatever their level of performance, including the lowest performers.
Question 3: Promote means or results indicators?
The choice of indicators for measuring and leading a challenge is crucial. Should you give priority to means (effort) or results indicators?
There are two criteria to take into account when making your choice.
- Length of sales cycle
Commitment comes from feedback, i.e. obtaining information on performance levels. A good sales promotion is therefore based on indicators that evolve with a minimum frequency (ideally weekly or even daily, or in real time). If the sales cycle is long, then the performance indicators will be slow to update: there's a risk that the ranking will take shape shortly before the end of the challenge. In this context, animation loses much of its value. Integrating average indicators (sales intensity), such as the number of appointments or calls made, then helps to maintain regular feedback and constant motivation.
- Certainty of success
A very important factor in commitment is what is known as certainty of success: if I know that I have a good chance of succeeding, then I will remain committed and perseverant in the pursuit of my goal. This concept is mentioned by several researchers, such as game design researcher Jane McGonigal and Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi in his flow theory. In this context, tracking sales intensity indicators adds a little certainty to the process. Indeed, obtaining appointments, making a certain number of calls, are actions whose quantity is more "controllable" and proportional to the efforts made; unlike the more uncertain results. So, adding sales intensity indicators to your results indicators is a good way of managing your business.
A winning combination
👉 To maximize the effectiveness of your challenge :
- Use average indicators to stimulate effort and reinforce commitment on a daily basis.
- Condition access to key rewards on results indicators, while rewarding efforts with symbolic rewards (badges, small gifts).
Question 4: What role do rewards play in a sales challenge?
Rewards are central to sales challenges, but they are not the only motivating factor. There are a number of criteria to help sales managers make the best use of their reward budget.
Award categories
First, let's take a look at the award categories.
- Bonuses: financial rewards forming part of most sales incentive plans.
- High-value rewards: trips or prestigious objects, often available following long-term challenges (annual challenges).
- Gift cards or gifts: rewards that are easy to adapt to different budgets, often offered as part of one-off challenges.
- Collective rewards: team activities or meals, often offered as part of one-off challenges.
- Symbolic rewards: badges, trophies, goodies, boxes of chocolates... offered throughout the year.
Two questions and best practices
- What is the current place of reward in your system?
👉 Avoid adding material rewards to the motivation system, as rewards reduce intrinsic motivation(see article on motivation). If your company distributes few rewards apart from salary and bonuses, symbolic or team rewards are preferred.
- What's your budget?
Reward value compares with salary and bonuses.
👉 If the budget is limited, prefer symbolic or collective rewards to low-value rewards.
👉 If the budget is substantial, diversify the rewards: spread the budget using different motivational levers (individual and collective objectives, competition and achievement etc.) so as to include the maximum number of participants.
Conclusion
There's no magic formula for organizing the perfect sales challenge. There are, however, four strategic questions that can guide us in its creation. By way of summary and conclusion, here are the four questions, reworded for further reflection:
- What impact will my challenge have on engagement over time?
- Which employees will be particularly involved in the challenge?
- Should I reward effort or results?
- How do I allocate my reward budget?
