As a sales manager, you’re continually helping your reps become more efficient in prospecting efforts to uncover a greater number of opportunities, providing guidance to move them swiftly through the pipeline and coaching during the negotiation process to win a higher percentage of those opportunities.
Competitions can serve as a great stepping-stone to driving this improvement amongst your sales team. They give you the ability to implement the desired behaviors, and they offer the repetition necessary to turn these small behavioral changes into the new norm.
2 Reasons You Need Sales Competitions
Think of the small things – like the meetings, calls and other customer touch points – your reps do over the life of an opportunity that make a difference between winning and losing. Putting emphasis on those activities/behaviors by way of competition can develop habits that remain long after the competition has ended.
Running competitions to change small behaviors can also provide your organization and its leaders a treasure trove of actionable data. This gives you the ability to constantly refine your approach and put focus on the specific area of your sales process requiring the most improvement.
A Breakdown: Tailoring Sales Competitions to Your Needs
Say you’re looking to improve efficiency of prospecting efforts amongst your sales team. Today that typically takes more phone calls and emails, with the goal of securing customer conversations or meetings. Let’s say your reps’ success rate is around 10%, so you know 100 calls or emails will yield 10 meetings. If you want more meetings, just increase the activity.
Digging into the data a little more, it looks like prospecting efforts to Director level contacts yields a 6:1 response rate. So you can create some competition around prospecting to the Director level.
Great that got you in the door, but your ideal buyer profile is the VP of Sales and getting them involved in the opportunity is one of the leading indicators of whether or not the deal will close. So you can also create competition around advancing opportunities, but make contact with the VP of Sales a requirement for advancement.
The end result is a higher hit rate in your prospecting efforts and a pipeline with better-qualified opportunities.
Obviously these are simplistic examples, and your business is undoubtedly more complex, but the idea remains the same: Identify the activities and behaviors that have the most significant impact on your sales process, and get your reps focused on those as an integral part of their day-to-day selling.
