5 steps to motivate a team around a challenge
Are you looking to stimulate your teams with a motivating challenge? Did the last challenge you organized not produce the expected results in terms of team motivation? Make sure you've thought of everything by reading our 5 key steps to organizing a truly motivating challenge.
Step 1: The first steps in motivating a team around a challenge
Clearly define an action plan
Define the purpose of the challenge in relation to a clearly defined action plan: Do we want to increase sales on a particular product line? Over a specific period? A specific customer segment? Increase customer satisfaction? Develop synergies between employees to motivate teams? Etc.
Set the participants and the duration of the challenge
Define which departments and functions will be involved in the challenge (field sales, sales force, marketing, service, product, assistance...) and over what period (how many days, weeks, months?), bearing in mind that the point of a challenge is to boost performance in specific areas, in parallel with the operational objectives assigned to each person.
Step 2: Select the performance indicators for your challenges.
Optimize the selection of engaging KPIs to motivate teams
Select the KPIs that will be tracked as part of the challenge and used to measure progress. It can be interesting to combine both quantitative and qualitative indicators (e.g.: number of leads generated + rate of transformation of leads into business) as well as individual and collective indicators to motivate a team effectively. On this page, you'll find a list of the sales indicators you need to motivate your sales force.
Prioritization of KPIs upstream
Prioritize the selected KPIs by order of importance. We advise you to apply a percentage of importance to each indicator and to assign a number of points to it. Example: Signing a new customer earns 10 points / Generating a lead earns 5 points / Making an appointment earns 2 points / A satisfaction rate (NPS) higher than 8 earns 20 points...
Step 3: Define incentive mechanisms to motivate teams.
The right levers for coaching and motivating participants.
Draft the rules of the challenge, ensuring that they are sufficiently clear and precise for the teams, who must have no doubts about the expected results and the elements counted. Another important aspect is to ensure that the challenge is "balanced", so that all participants have an equal chance of success. For example, if you decide to include a sales indicator, but your teams include salespeople with different account sizes, you'll need to adapt the conditions to be reached for each participant.
The need to define a clear budget
Establish the precise budget that will be allocated and the mechanics of reward: Do we make all participants win according to the performance achieved at the end of the challenge or do we make only the first three win (in the form of a podium)?
Rewards: choosing the right levers to motivate teams
Define the rewards in line with the budget: salary bonus, gift card, team meal, trip, etc. We recommend that you offer a sufficiently wide choice to ensure that the rewards offered are truly motivating for as many people as possible. Not everyone wants a new iPad! We give you 5 original reward ideas for your sales challenges.
Stage 4: Organizing and launching your incentives to motivate teams
Preparation is the key to a successful sales challenge launch
Prepare the launch of the challenge and choose the tools that will enable you to communicate to your teams their daily progress (Email, Powerpoint, Excel spreadsheet, specific application, etc.).
Generally speaking (in more than 80% of cases), we note that the results of the challenges are communicated by e-mail through spreadsheets that are not always very engaging for the employees and whose data are too rarely updated.
Clearly communicate to teams the challenges of the incentive
Officially launch the challenge by communicating as clearly as possible the rules and the stakes for the company, as well as the benefits that each employee will derive from it (recognition, pleasure linked to the competition, or the synergy created by collaboration).
It's also advisable to take advantage of a face-to-face event for the launch (national/regional meeting, kick-off, new product launch...) to benefit from the positive energy and create greater emulation to motivate teams.
Step 5: Challenge management and iterative approach
Manage the challenge using collaborative communication tools, dashboards, dynamic rankings and regular notifications to ensure that the competition is run in a friendly manner. Managers also play an important role, using the challenge to coach and encourage their employees collectively and/or individually: the success of an employee or team is often beneficial for their manager too.
Calculate the ROI generated by the implementation of the challenge (performance gain obtained on the incentivized indicators - VS - expected result). Obviously, the calculation of the ROI requires a minimum of historical data on these indicators.
Survey the participants: what did they think? Are there any differences in the level of support from different teams? Do they have any ideas to share for the organization of future challenges?
Take stock and close the challenge by analyzing the results and recognizing the efforts of each participant to motivate a team.
What's up? Ready to organize a motivating challenge?
From the definition of your objectives to the assessment, let yourself be guided by an intuitive and complete platform. Fire Tiger can help you define your needs and objectives, select relevant performance indicators, define incentive mechanisms adapted to the profiles of your employees, set up animation tools and rewards, and finally get the most out of your challenge.
Start by discovering the 5 fundamental reasons to digitize your challenges.
