Sales Blog for Sales and Sales Management

There is great excitement about the NCAA basketball tournament for both the men and the women.  How would you go about creating your own Sales Madness for sales in the month of March?  As Dave Dittman from Dittman Incentive Marketing says:  What motivates and inspires someone is as unique as the individual. But the principles of workplace performance improvements are universal: Communication. Training. Measurement. Recognition. Rewards. Relationships.

1. Create your own pool of fellow sales people - at least 8; they don't even have to be in the same company
2. Identify the sales metrics to use to determine the 'game'
3. Identify what is a 'win'
4. Using the 'pull a name out of the hat' method, create your pairings and bracket
5. Create a reward for winning at each level; allow for a play back in opportunity so that people just don't quit after their first 'loss'
6. Have people vested in the winnings - they put in money, kind of like an ante in a poker game
7. Identify the payout for the top three spots - this must be motivating enough to get people to actually want to win
8. Go play

Now my guess is that, unlike the tournaments being played now, you want to have more than three weeks of competition.  If you have a one call sales cycle, that format will work.  If you have a three month sales cycle, then your tournament would actually start in January and culminate in March.

Sales and selling can get boring.  Contest normally don't work because they aren't created and run by the sales people and too often those that don't 'win' early are eliminated and lose enthusiasm.  Try this and see what happens. By the way, I'm calling this March Madness because it fits for the current event.  You can have Summer Sales Slam, October Fest, Happy New Year or Super Sales Bowl. Don't wait until next year to drive your sales.

As a manager of sales or as a sales person you may have asked or inquired: what really motivates me to sell. What is it that I could do or the company could do that would be an incentive for me to sell more?

1. You should subscribe to the newsletter in this post from Selling Power
2. Here is an article on incentives and selling.