Making Sales Motivation Programs Effective

Cash isn’t always the right award to motivate your sales force.  For years we’ve seen companies throw cash at sales objectives with poor results.  It is the obvious go to award and the easiest to implement and administer but not always the best one.  To make a motivation program effective, you need to make the rewards relevant and specific to the needs and demographics of your sales force.  

For most salespeople there are three instinctive motivations that can influence their performance:

1.     The proper balance between remuneration and rewards 

2.     The desire to achieve success and exceed goals 

3.     Recognition and security

It is essential that remuneration and rewards for salespeople be strongly linked to performance. If you already have a very strong cash incentive or bonus, it might not be best to just add more cash to it to get a boost in a particular objective.  If an increase in sales is how your salespeople earn their base and bonus compensation, the best ones will be doing all they can to earn as much as they can already.  Probably more than any one type of employee, salespeople will work to seek their comfort level, and when they achieve it, they don’t move much to get more.

If you don’t have a sound compensation package not linked to accomplishments, don’t be surprised by the poor performance of your salespeople or by seeing the best of them move on. When designing your system, it's critical to have a real gap between the excellent, the good, the average and the people who struggle. The best won't be motivated to go above and beyond if there's little-to-no difference. For motivation programs to achieve incremental performance over a short time, consider non cash awards interesting to demographics of your people.  And in those types of programs choice of award is critical.  Let them set their sights on what they want for their own lifestyle.  Do you really think that the hot briefcase of the moment or a new watch will motivate everyone?  It surely motivates the ad rep that is selling them to you.

Any decent sales person we’ve ever met is driven by success. They need victories to move forward so put in place objectives around the different selling steps for your product and formally recognize those who achieve them.  Then grow those objectives and set increasingly ambitious targets to move that group to higher and higher levels of performance and recognition.  A myriad of selling skills can be addressed in these types of programs.  One of the main benefits is that it is easy for each salesperson to measure their real contribution to the company and enjoy the recognition they receive from it.

Good salespeople are typically less concerned with job security, than the average employee. They can take risks more easily than the general population. This allows them not only to be at ease in a job where the activity is clearly measured and driven by performance, but also to change jobs if a more interesting offer comes along in another company. When you are finalizing your overall program be sure to congratulate and celebrate the ultimate successes.  These are the group of people that you will move your company forward.