Sales contests around deals closed are commonplace. Sales contests around onboarding sales reps? Not so much. But Cardinal Health proved that the latter is just as valuable of an option.
The Cardinal team added a little competition to the onboarding process and saw it create greater internal collaboration, new sales opportunities and increased visibility into sales data.
We share their experience in our newest eBook, “Sales Contests for Sales Onboarding? Ask Cardinal Health.” Here’s an excerpt:
It started small. 3 sales reps. 2 weeks. 1 sales contest.
But the results were not. 3 sales reps onboarded quicker and in a more collaborative fashion. In only 2 weeks. Using just 1 sales contest…that led to 570 new sales opportunities.
So Cardinal Health plans on running more contests around sales onboarding in the future.
And that’s the snapshot. Here’s the story…
As is the case with many organizations, Cardinal had a set process for getting sales reps on board, with detailed steps that add up to three ideas:
Introduce the rest of the team.
Teach the company offering.
Ease into selling.
Cardinal leadership recently decided to get innovative with that process, though, by adding sales contests to the mix.
The reasoning? Simple. Cardinal understood that sales contests can get your sales reps motivated and focused around key sales behaviors and that onboarding’s filled with critical sales activities.
So they designed a sales contest with this structure…
I. Participants
Cardinal wanted a small target group to start. They picked three reps that came on board around the same time, from three different teams – Alabama, Michigan and Louisiana.
II. Behaviors
In order to select which activities would earn points in the contest, Cardinal sales leadership considered a two-part question: Which sales behavior is easy to grasp, but will make a critical difference once the new team members learn how to successfully carry it out?
The answer was face-to-face meetings, or product demos, around two of their key product lines.
Then instructions around earning points for the behavior were specific: Present a demo within an opportunity you generate and then log that activity in Salesforce.
III. Timeframe
Two weeks made sense for a starting point – long enough to create results, but not so long as to jeopardize contest engagement
So with that, Daniel Raymer, Cardinal’s Surgery Center Midwest Region Manager who led the initiative, admits he didn’t know exactly what to expect. And the three participants, who had never met prior, wished one another good luck.
Check out the full story to learn how this contest increased sales opportunities, data visibility & internal collaboration!
