Having the right sales incentives can do a lot towards boosting your sales team’s performance. Thankfully, motivating people to work harder is actually easier than it sounds. You need an appropriate rewards system.
For some teams, establishing a fair and well-balanced cash incentives program can already push your sales personnel to do their best. You can even streamline and automate this system with some finely tuned and well-proven compensation management software.
However, not every employee is encouraged by the usual bonuses. This is when things can get challenging if you’re a manager. Luckily, there are some other rewards you can offer that will motivate and guide your sales force towards improved results. Here are three of them:
Remove Commission Ceilings
Let’s start with a simple change for an existing cash incentives-based system: removing your commission ceilings. Putting a monthly or weekly cap on commissions can indeed help your company keep its operating costs down.
However, it could also discourage your star salespeople from continuing to do their best after they’ve hit their ceiling. Research from the University of Rochester has shown that this indeed happens in many companies, with some personnel keeping their sales under the ceiling in response.
By removing the limits for commissions, you minimize the chances of your employees slacking off once they’ve maximized their quotas. This keeps your sales team properly motivated at all times, with the increased ceiling’s cost offset by a hungrier team that’s keen to close more deals.
Institute a More Inclusive Rewards System
With any team, it’s natural to end up with a consistent core unit that performs exceptionally and consistently. While this is generally good for business, this can end up demoralizing the other members of the group. This is especially true if your star performers are the only ones getting praised or rewarded.
In situations like these, a good idea would be to institute a looser and more inclusive metric for rewarding your team. This can become part of your rewards system. One example of doing this is by scaling your team’s monthly quotas based on individual performances. Better-performing or longtime employees can be assigned higher quotas, while newer ones can have more forgiving quotas to help them get started.
Another way to do this could include having a system that rewards reaching certain milestones, regardless of success. Just as an example, you could put up a small bonus for salespeople who successfully go through 100 cold calls, regardless of whether a deal was closed.
What’s important here is to avoid rewarding only a small group of people, while still maintaining a sense of competitiveness throughout the entire team. Putting more rewards up for grabs also helps push underperformers in your team to pick up the pace and continue doing their best.
Offer Some Paid Time Off
Though money is indeed important, it’s not the only reward you can offer your team. Different people could have different priorities in life. Indeed, some members of your sales team might value being with their family more than any cash bonus you could offer. For these types, consider offering paid time off as a reward for excellent performance.
For employees who are family-oriented, this presents a chance to work hard to be with their families. In the long run, this could even keep your entire team happy and increase retention rates for your key performers. As long as your team has enough hands to cover for each other, this can even keep costs down for the company.
When you find your company’s sales figures starting to flounder, it’s only natural to start questioning your team’s commitment. But with the right rewards system, you can guarantee that your team continues to work as hard and as best they can. Get to know your team, and find out what motivates them before you choose the right incentive program that works for everyone.
