There are several things in life I thoroughly enjoy. To name a few: spending time with my family, watching my favorite bands play live, volunteering with groups like Forgotten Harvest, eating sweet potato fries (man I love those things) and listening to companies discuss initiatives they’re trying to motivate inside of Salesforce.
Alright, so I know what you’re thinking about that last category: I had to add that because I’m writing this for our work blog. But it’s true. In fact, that’s the reason I’m writing in the first place — to talk about a trend within that category.
When it comes to companies motivating certain company initiatives, I’ve been in the middle of one common conversation a lot lately. Sales leaders want to understand how they can overcome struggles when they’re about to launch a new product or service.
Having been involved in several product launches myself, I can definitely relate to some of the challenges. Companies spend incredible amounts of time, resources and money engineering the “next big thing” and all that comes with it. But here’s the unfortunate part: Employees are generally nervous to even mention new products to prospects. There’s just a natural sense of fear and uncertainty about learning something new, which typically leads to a gap between the time you introduce your sales team to a new product or service and the time they start selling it.
What some companies are doing about it…
Today, many organizations like Transamerica, Dun & Bradstreet, Detroit Pistons, HelloWorld, Tapjoy and Dyn are investing in sales motivation technologies and strategies to help get their teams out of that uncomfortable zone when launching new products and services. And they are experiencing some seriously fast ROI as a result.
As part of their sales motivation strategy, these companies launch entire internal campaigns around new product launches. This includes:
- Defining critical sales goals/metrics for when a competition launches
- Building competition around the metrics needed to achieve those goals
- Publicly displaying leaderboards to socialize performance against those metrics
- Offering increased recognition and chances for stronger collaboration around the product launch
Here’s an example of how one of those campaigns might look:
- Name: For Those About To Pitch, We Salute You!
- Goal: Get sales team to focus on taking new products or services to market quicker
- Length: 2 weeks
- Contest team structure: Individual against individual
- Contest point structure: 5 points for every time a rep pitches the new product or service (TIP: If you need help tracking which pitches are for your new product, have reps add a certain hashtag when logging the events in your CRM. For example, is it your new mobile app? Try “APP.”)
- Additional Incentive: A gift card to Ticketmaster and/or StubHub for the winner’s concert of choice. And why not… a limo that picks up the lucky sales rep from work and drives straight to the concert venue.
So, what do you think? Have you tried anything like this? Have questions about what would happen if you did? Leave your comments below. In the meantime, we’ll leave you with this:
