A typical sales contest usually lasts about a month, maybe a quarter for a longer one. And while these longer contests are important to drive your team to hit or exceed their numbers, due to the length, team members can become disengaged or lack motivation as the contest wears on. This is especially true if the contest leader is so far ahead that the others don’t have a reasonable chance of catching up.
So what happens? The contest loses its mojo.
How Can I Keep The Contest Mojo Up?
Try creating a “sweeten the pot” contest. This kind of contest runs concurrently with a longer sales contest, but is shorter and intended to drive up participation and motivation for that period of time. It provides participants the opportunity to gain extra points in the overall contest, as well as the chance to win multiple times during a longer contest.
For example, you can create a “sweeten the pot” contest that lasts 2 hours based on which participant can book the most meetings. Or, you could run a contest for 5 days for whomever successfully moves the most opportunities to the next stage in Salesforce. The idea here is to create these contests around the behaviors that help drive success in the longer, overall sales contest.
Why “Sweeten the Pot”?
These contests work because they keep participants engaged by allowing multiple ways to earn points in a longer contest and provide many opportunities to win. Because you are building the “sweeten the pot” contests around behaviors that support larger sales goals, these contests help participants get better results overall, and likewise will positively impact your bottom line sales goals. It also helps keep the team fully engaged if they fall out of contention in the overall contests, while avoiding becoming discouraged or disengaged as a result.
How Do I Set One Up?
A great option is to leverage LevelEleven’s parent/child contest creator. A parent/child contest allows you to create a broader parent contest and assign multiple child contests where the accumulation of the child contest points roll up to the parent contest totals. This allows you to easily control what influences your overall parent contests, and drive engagement for the duration of your campaign.
So, the takeaway here is that, if need be, you can easily “sweeten the pot” to improve your sales contests. You’ll see the results in your team’s performance, and get that important sales contest mojo back where it belongs!
