33 Inexpensive (or FREE) Incentive Ideas for Your Next Sales Contest

Spark Engagement & Motivation with Sales Contests

Everybody loves a good sales contest, right?

Sales contests help improve team morale, encourage teamwork and/or healthy competition, and increase excitement and engagement among sales teams. A sales contest motivates your sales reps to focus on a specific goal or metric for a temporary period of time, driving activities and behaviors that you want to promote.

Salespeople are competitive by nature, and it doesn’t take a Cadillac or a trip to the Bahamas to motivate them.

They want to win and be recognized for their success, so a smaller, well-placed incentive is often very effective in motivating short-term performance.

Sure, you could give them an Amazon gift card and let them choose what they want. But sometimes it’s fun to get creative with your contest prizes!

But who has time to think of all this stuff?

We do!

And we did.

We compiled 33 of our favorite (inexpensive) sales incentives below for you to consider when you plan your next sales contest.

1. Let the winner choose a leadership team member’s Zoom background for a week.
2. Pizza and a beer [if your state allows alcohol delivery] sent to the winner’s house on Friday at 4.
3. Send a ‘care package’ to their home with some of their favorite snacks or kind of coffee/tea.
4. Let the winner choose the Slack [or whatever messaging channel you use] profile picture & status of the team member of their choosing for a week.
5. Let the winner stop work an hour early each day for one week.
6. Send flowers to the winner’s house.
7. Alternatively, use a service such as Bloomscape to send a plant to their house for their home office.
8. Find fun office supplies that match your winner’s interests (for example, an unusual tape dispenser shaped like an otter) and have them shipped to the winner.
9. Name your next contest after the contest winner – add some fun language in there, like “The Time We Tried (Again) to Beat Dwight S.”
10. Winner gets a public shout-out on LinkedIn from the CEO, or a written Recommendation on their LinkedIn profile from their team lead.
11. [Virtual] Happy hour with the CEO.
12. Give the winner 1 hour a day for a week to do something related to their career development that they wouldn’t ordinarily have time to do in their day-to-day, like attending fun webinars, reading a good book, etc.
13. Recognition in a company-wide email from the CEO.
14. Personal handwritten thank-you note from the CEO mailed to them.
15. Small figurine from the winner’s university that they can put on their own desk at home.
16. Lottery tickets.
17. Picture of the winner featured on the company blog for a week.
18. Recognition for the winner on all company social media channels.
19. Quick video of team members congratulating the winner recorded and sent to the winner via email or social media.
20. Already planning on sponsoring a conference, but not sure who to send? Choose the winner.
21. As a bonus to what’s above, let the winner choose who will attend the conference with them.
22. A homemade fun sign that says “Winner” or “Big Deal” in a picture frame.
23. Winner gets the day before/after a holiday weekend off.
24. At the next team meeting, make everyone go around and say one awesome thing about the winner.
25. Get an office-wide list going via email that says “Why We Think [Insert Winner’s Name] Is a Rockstar” and have everyone contribute.
26. Take the number of points the winner won by, and give them that amount of PTO hours. (If it’s a large number of points, try using another number that relates to the contest, like the amount of team members competing, the percentage of points the team member was ahead by or the amount of days the contest ran.)
27. Give the winner a 30-min “Win” break each day for a week, that they’ll get in addition to lunch. (They can use it to take a walk, have a snack or even start work late.)
28. Give the contest winner a fun nickname like “Macho Man,” etc. and make everyone call him or her that name for a week. (Sticking with their favorite wrestler or superhero name is always fun.)
29. Winner gets to pass off one project to another team member.
30. Winner gets a 1:1 mentoring session with the CEO.
31. Give the winner their 15 minutes! Have your PR team watch for opportunities where it’d be suitable for the contest winner to be quoted in a big article.
32. Gift card for any fun home office accessory.
33. Custom bobblehead. (You can get these customized to look like team members, or characters that team members love.)

Sustainable, Long-Term Growth

Keep in mind, while short-term incentives are exciting, you need more sustainable behavior-changing processes to ensure success in the long term. While contests bring a spark of excitement and energy, they aren’t enough to drive performance alone.

The ultimate sales team success is achieved through a combination of:

• Effective, results-driven behaviors
• Strategically crafted processes
• Well-placed incentives

These three elements are critical for your performance management methodology – and something LevelEleven can help with. Using our solution, you can build sales contests that fit your team with custom incentives, track their performance with scorecards, and coach them to success with coaching notes.

If you want to take your team’s performance to the next level, request a demo to discover how our solution can help you motivate, engage, and coach your team to success.