“I thought salespeople were motivated by money!”

I was speaking with a sales manager a few weeks ago. Ted (his name was changed to protect the innocent) was telling me about his sales team and his challenges in motivating them. He told me his compensation structure is a basic commission against draw structure.

As all good managers do, Ted sets specific goals with each member of his sales team. If they achieve their goals, they should make a nice living. Like most sales teams, Ted has a variety of achievers – those who always hit their quota, those who are more challenged but managed to get pretty close and those who should find another line of work. Ted’s toughest job is figuring out how to get them all excited so they sell more.

Ted recently instituted a bonus plan designed to get his salespeople to produce more sales. If they achieved these “stretch goals,” they would earn an additional $2,500. He was convinced that they would sit up and take notice of this generous bonus and run out to aggressively pursue more contracts. “Salespeople are only motivated by money,” he said. “Whenever we ask them what they want, they always say ‘money!'”  So he was shocked when the offer of the bonus did NOTHING to change their motivation.

Does Ted’s situation sound familiar to you? Have you cracked the code on inspiring focus and follow-through with your sales professionals? I’ve heard this scenario played out across industries, in public and private companies, and in large and small sales teams. Yes, it’s true that salespeople are motivated by money. But the form of that money matters.

Lucky for Ted, we were able to re-think the bonus offering, how it was earned and how it was delivered. The top achievers exceeded expectations, many of the middle made their numbers and even some of the struggling salespeople worked harder to get the mentoring and direction they needed to improve their skills.

Matching the right incentive to your sales team matters and it should be win-win situation for your company’s bottom line and your salesperson’s ego.

If you’re thinking about implementing a bonus program, don’t do it until you’ve taken advantage of our early 2013 free offer.

We have a limited number of FREE STRATEGY SESSIONS on “Designing Effective Incentives”.  If you’d like to apply for one of these, complete the information at the link below.

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According to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, ‘holistic’ means “relating to or concerned with complete systems rather than with individual parts.” We understand that when we’re talking about medicine, a ‘holistic’ approach means to treat both the mind and the body. Have you ever thought about taking a ‘holistic’ approach to employee engagement when it comes to providing incentives?

Many companies see the benefit of implementing an incentive program to motivate their top performers. Incentive travel programs, specifically, are effective when targeting top salespeople or most loyal customers because they are in a position to generate sales or revenue to earn the reward. And the revenues they generate are substantial enough to fund the program.

But what impact does incentivizing the top echelon have on others in the organization who are either the middle performers who are unlikely to achieve the goals or in another department altogether and not even eligible?

A more ‘holistic’ approach to the engagement would mean implementing incentive programs that address the entire population or employees or customers, not just certain individual parts.

There are ways to offer incentives to every single person in your company. Even if a middle manager can’t quality for a trip to the Caribbean, they could secure enough points over time to go to a nearby city for a long weekend or choose a new I-Pad. Even at the entry level, performance can be enhanced by the promise of gift cards.

And these programs don’t have to bust your budget. You can allocate a certain percentage of any cost savings that is seen by improved performance to fund a reward program and your company will still see increased profits. (See our article Making Dollars and Sense in Incentive Magazine – Nov/Dec 2012 issue – about funding an incentive reward program.)

For more information on engaging all of your employees and customers in achieving better performance, contact Colin Higgins at colin@peincentives.com or call 978-287-9500.

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