Sales competitions can be a fun and engaging way to motivate the members of a sales team and help them make crucial progress towards their targets. As exciting as sales can be, it can also become somewhat monotonous at times, particularly when teams are engaged in repetitive activities like cold calling. Fortunately, with competition, sales teams can rediscover their motivation, and start leveraging the “fun” side of selling.
What is a Sales Competition?
A sales contest, or sales competition is a game in which individual salespeople or groups of sales professionals compete to win a prize. The exact nature of a sales competition will depend on the goal of the business. For instance, if you want to motivate your employees to make more calls in a shorter space of time, the competition may revolve around who can make the most successful calls in an hour.
The purpose of a sales competition is to increase positive KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for a company, by motivating teams and encouraging them to do their best work.
Not only do sales competitions improve sales, they can also enhance the overall morale of the sales team, generate collaboration between groups, and maintain engagement, reducing sales professional churn in the workforce.
Sales Competition Ideas
The exact sales competitions you use to motivate your team will depend on a number of factors, including what kind of activities make your teams feel the most “engaged”.
Some employees work best in direct competition, when they’re pitted against their colleagues in one-on-one battles, others prefer team competitions which boost team bonding, or goal-based competitions in which the focus is on driving better outcomes for the business overall. Some of the best sales competitions ideas include:
1. Prize of the Day
A prize of the day sales competition can either be an individual or team competition, depending on your needs. The idea is to pick a specific KPI or metric you want your sales professionals to focus on for the day, and give rewards based on who performs best in that area.
For instance, if the goal is to increase total number of sales, you can reset the sales tracker at the start of each day, and tally up which member of your team achieved the most sales by the time the day is over. The great thing about this strategy is your teams get multiple chances to win over time.
2. Employee of the month
Employee of the month sales competitions are common in a lot of businesses. They involve rewarding team members based on their performance in a number of different areas, rather than focusing on a singular metric. With employee of the month, you look at not just who achieved the highest sales, but who performed the best in things like customer satisfaction and team selling.
If you feel your employees begin to lose interest in the employee of the month title too quickly, you could consider using employee of the week instead.
3. Sales pitch competitions
Sales pitches are a common part of most sales jobs, so it’s a good idea to give your teams rewards based on the quality and content of their sales pitches. Have your staff members perform their pitches to you either one by one, or with the whole team.
If your employees aren’t always working in the same office, they could send an example of their sales draft to you for a chance to win. You can examine each pitch and award the best the title of winner. This can also help you to suggest future sales pitch templates for the rest of your professionals.
4. Team contests
Team sales contests are excellent when you want to encourage camaraderie and collaboration between the members of your group. Sales can be a highly competitive environment, but it’s much easier to run a successful team when everyone can work together.
You could consider assigning people to teams at random, by picking names out of a hat. Once everyone has their team, pick a specific challenge for them to work towards, like getting the highest number of closed deals in a week. You can change the teams every so often to help form new bonds between different members of staff.
5. Bracket contest
This is a pretty easy option for a sales competition, and it can work either for individual salespeople or teams. Find a bracket template online then place two team member’s names or group names in each bracket. Have the teams compete to see who gets the highest sales numbers. Between the two groups whoever has the highest number can move onto the next round, and so on.
You can create a set of brackets for each sales round until there’s only one winner. You might also offer prizes to runner ups in this case, to help keep everyone motivated.
6. Sales bingo
Sales bingo can be an excellent game to play when the general activities of the sales team are getting a little repetitive or boring. If you know your teams are losing inspiration, create bingo boards with different types of sales listed on them. For instance, you could categorize sales based on price ranges, client industry, or products.
When each team member completes a sale that corresponds with a tile on the bingo board. The first team member to get bingo will be the one who receives your reward.
