Do Sales Contests Work?

Every single day I get several emails concerning sales contests. Each person is as sincere as they can be in wanting to motivate their sales force.

I’ve tried to work with a few of them, but deep down in my sales-minded heart, I knew that if the sales person wasn’t self-motivated, then there was little anyone could do to motivate them over a long enough period to count for something.

I’ve wished for enough time to research the subject properly, but you know what happens when you wish for something and not work for it.

Not much. Action beats asking almost every time. Almost.

A day or so ago, I was pleased to read an email by Dan Kennedy that said it almost exactly like I wish I’d said it.

I wrote and asked for permission to reprint it here and my request was granted, as long as I gave full credit, which I was quick to agree to.

All I ask for you to do is to consider clicking thru and signing up for Dan’s email course titled Successful Marketing Strategies, which can be found on Dan’s website. Visit his site and wait a couple of seconds and a fly-in popup will come across the screen and allow you to sign up.

I save all of Dan’s emails, as part of my swipe file and I just looked back and saw that I’ve been a subscriber since early 2004, so don’t be afraid, he won’t hurt you and his info is top notch.

Now, here’s Dan’s take on sales contests:

Do Sales Contests Work ?

In your last Success Marketing Strategy we began our discussion on sales and the management of sales people. I pointed out that in managing sales people you’ll actually be dealing with three distinctly different situations.

The first was the poor performers and all the problems that they bring to an organization. But now I would like to shift our attention to the group that is mostly ignored my management which are the high performers.

If you’re looking for a prompt increase in sales a good way to get it is to divert some attention from the mediocre group to the high performance group. It’s much easier to coach a successful person to even better performance than to get a mediocre performer to begin succeeding.

The bottom line though is that the only real motivation is self-motivation. You cannot take control of someone else’s thinking. Motivate them and keep them motivated purely through your external influence. The motivation that helps the sales professional achieve peak performance comes mostly from within.

As a manager or a business owner you should concentrate on providing an environment and an opportunity where a person can develop that self-motivation and a set of good business tools for the motivated performers use.

Accountability is also important. You need to obtain detailed, frequent reporting from your sales people that you can analyze to identify strengths and weaknesses in their performance, prospects or types of prospects being neglected, customer service problems and other situations that you can take action to prevent or correct.

Management’s toughest and most important job is the collection of accurate information about what’s actually going on out there on the sales battlefield. Some sales managers like to use special contests and incentive programs to motivate and reward their sales people.

I think the overall results of such programs are disappointing management more often than not and I believe I’ve identified one common error in structuring these programs. Many contests and incentives base the winning on end results, sales volume, number of accounts, etc. However, for a contest to serve multiple purposes, to motivate, to teach, to affect behavioral changes in the sales people it should focus more on the activities that produce desirable results than on the results themselves.

For example, contest points might better be based on the number of complete presentations made to qualified prospects than on the number of new accounts put on the books.

Dan would go on to say that he’ll be giving me more info about increasing the performance of sales people in his next email, which I’m looking forward to.

Click thru and signup today and start learning direct marketing from a modern day master tomorrow.

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