Tips For Structuring A Sales Incentive Program

When you are looking at ways to improve the effectiveness and productivity of your sales force, you may find that instituting an incentives program may be one of the more effective ways of boosting the output of your sales staff. As you are looking at your options for creating one of these programs, you should be mindful of a few strategies that may improve the effectiveness of your program.

Have An Appropriate Reward

In order to motivate your employees to strive to succeed with the incentive program, you may need to have a suitable reward. Otherwise, employees may have little incentive to put forward the effort needed to achieve their goals. Unfortunately, some businesses leaders may avoid investing in a high-quality reward. In addition to failing to motivate your employees, choosing a low-quality reward may be somewhat insulting to your employees as they may see it as demeaning. If you are concerned about the costs of this reward, you can structure the program so that the rewards are directly tied to the income generated by the employee.

Institute A Thorough Tracking System

In order to hold a fair contest, you will want to be sure that you have an accurate tracking system in place. Ideally, you should have one individual dedicated to the task of monitoring the results of each employee and verifying them against the orders the company has received. Rather than waiting to review this information at the end of the contest, you should have this done at least once every few days as this will allow errors to be corrected while the applicable documentation is still readily available. To discourage unethical behavior, you should have strict penalties in place for individuals that are found attempting to cheat or otherwise game the program's rules.  

Design The Program To Avoid Overwhelming Your Customers

While a sales incentive program can help to boost the motivation of your employees to meet their goals, it is important to balance this need with the comfort and patience of your customers. Otherwise, it can be easy to inadvertently alienate some of your customers through overly aggressive sales techniques. For this reason, you should encourage your employees to be mindful of the frequency with which they are approaching customers. While the exact steps for meeting this need will vary based on the way that your company interacts with customers, taking the time to devise a strategy that is tailored to your business's needs may greatly reduce the risk of you alienate customers.

For more information, contact a company like Fab at Incentives.

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