Sales incentive programs within a business can kick your sales into overdrive while motivating your team to achieve more.
These programs can be tailored to any specific outcome your brand seeks—sales growth, market share, increasing share of wallet, and attracting new customers without resorting to temporary measures such as price reductions or discounts.
The beauty of these programs is that they can operate entirely self-funded, allowing your business to solve specific pain points without needing to dip into your budget. However, that’s not to say that a sales incentive program is a simple solution.
Using data-driven analysis is integral to finding success within your program. With a specific set of goals, your program may be able to connect with your audience, but without results, your brand will lose time, money, and effort. Worst of all, you won’t be able to deliver your desired revenue results.
We’ve outlined a few essential points for driving revenue with your sales incentive programs. If you follow these, you’re sure to find success!
Ready to build a sales incentive program tailored to your business needs?
Focused and Defined Objectives
The first step is establishing a focused and defined objective for your program. This step requires forward assessment and active reflection. Specifically, what are you looking to solve with the program? Historically, what has worked with your customers in the past?
By defining a key objective and understanding the connection with your customer base, you can clearly explain the program and determine the expected results. With a clearly defined, understandable program, your participants will understand what it takes to participate and succeed.
However, just having your participants understand is only half the battle. You must ensure that your program and its objectives are fully understood within the business. Your team will be the ones who need to sell the program and assist with any troubles on the customer’s end, so their understanding is also essential to success.
Provide communications and meetings to ensure they fully understand the program’s details. A united and informed team is the best way to drive success!
Personalisation is Key
Beyond having your participants understand the program, your sales incentive program needs to find a way to connect with each of them—how they want to use it. Your program’s goals must feel achievable to each participant. If they think the goal is out of reach or unattainable, they’ll fail to connect and cannot provide the results your brand created the program for.
By creating regular communications and touchpoints with your sales team to communicate their position and what they need to do to succeed, you can place your brand front-of-mind when it comes time to purchase while creating additional forms of value for transacting with your business.
This can also be established by providing individual goals for each customer. Using a custom-made sales incentive program platform designed especially for your business needs, you can track each customer’s performance and monitor their progress towards the target. This leads us to our next point…
Drive Competitive Spirit
Using the aforementioned tailored incentive program platform, you can use publicly available leaderboards to instil a competitive spirit in your participants. It’s no secret that sales teams are very competitive—it’s in their nature—and using these leaderboards can stoke the flames of competition, driving them towards the end goal while inflating your sales results.
Coupling this with tailored communications and regular meetings with your sales team and BDMs, you can reinforce the change in behaviour that your program is seeking while inspiring them to continue reaching ahead for future years.
Provide Recognition
Achieving something is a great feeling, especially something you’ve been working towards for an extended period. By recognising this sense of achievement and publicly announcing and recognising the winners, you can showcase how the behaviour demonstrated within the program helped them earn their place on the winner’s podium.
This serves two purposes: By celebrating the individuals, you create a sense of accomplishment that they’re likely to share with others and create a positive connection between your brand and the individual. Additionally, you share what was needed to reach this position, which can help those who didn’t achieve the target understand what will be required the next time the program is run.
Recognition goes hand-in-hand with reinforcement – show the world what it takes to win, and they’ll understand the effort required!
Work with the Experts
These are some of the crucial points required to drive revenue through a successful sales incentive program, complemented by years of experience and success within the industry. By linking your program with an external partner with a depth of knowledge in incentive structure, technology and strategy, you can set yourself up for success.
Incremental has been creating bespoke sales incentive programs for businesses across Australia (and globally) since 1998, and our strategy and success are there to support our accomplishments. With our internal data teams working to create tailored program platforms designed to help your brand achieve specific business goals, we can provide end-to-end solutions that will solve your business pain points and achieve sales increases to boost your brand to unforeseen levels.