Build an Incentive Plan For Your Business
Creating Sales Motivation Through Incentive Trips
Employee incentive and rewards travel programs are an effective way to express recognition for employee performance. Rewarding high performing sales teams with incentive trips can result in an overall improvement in a company’s bottom line. Not only do incentive trips increase sales, they also go a long way in maintaining high employee morale.
But, before diving in and sending everyone on a fabulous trip, it’s important to create a formal sales incentive program for your team. The program must not only be motivating with an attractive incentive, but the goals must also be perceived as achievable.
What Motivates Your Team?
What types of destinations would inspire your team to work harder and more effectively? Are they inspired by relaxation? Would an adventurous excursion peak their interest? What if you take them to some exotic destination they may never visit on their own? The opportunity to create memories that will last a lifetime is your goal. A desirable incentive trip will serve as a huge motivator for your sales team. In order to reach their goals, they will be more productive in their jobs, leading to increased sales and a sustainable customer base.
Sales associates who do not win the incentive trip will be further motivated to do better next time if the trips are remarkably desirable!
Establish Sales Goals
Start with the end in mind. First, consider your sales expectations. Then, reach a little further and determine the level at which you would like to celebrate exceeding expectations. If the challenges and demands of the incentive program are too great, you run the risk of a deflated sales team who gives up too quickly. And, speaking of teams, creating team-oriented goals will help develop internal bonds as your staff work together to achieve them. If an entire team meets their goals and wins the incentive trip, the bond only continues to grow as they travel together. This bond will carry back over into the workplace and the cycle will continue in order to meet the next goals for the next incentive trip.
Don’t Worry About Your Travel Budget
Rest assured – sales incentive trips can be flexible. Incentive travel is fully scalable and can be customized to accommodate any budget and number of people. Although long trips with big groups can sound fun, there are many benefits to keeping things small. For example, short incentive trips with fewer winners will not only save money, it will create a more intimate and more personally customized experience for the group. It will also create a sense of exclusivity, inspiring competition among your sales teams to win the next trip.
Everyone Loves a Vacation
The thing that sets sales incentive trips apart from other rewards is that they provide your team with experiences they might not have had on their own. Treating your high performing sales team to an all-expense-paid vacation to thank them for a job well done is a great way of instilling company loyalty.
But beyond that, the company benefits from the increased productivity and the employee benefits from the rewards and recognition for all their hard work. It’s a win-win! So what are you waiting for? Start planning your first (or next) sales incentive trip today!
Tips from the Pros!
Check out what these industry leaders think about when building their incentive programs!
Bob Marsh from LevelEleven –
One of the biggest mistakes companies make when creating incentive programs, is that they don’t provide enough visibility into the teams progress. The incentive itself is very important, but salespeople also always need to know where they stand and what actions they need to take to achieve their goal.
Posting sales results is part of that, but companies also need to reverse engineer the sales goals back to things like how much pipeline is needed to hit the goal, how many new opportunities need to be created, how many meetings need to happen to hit that pipeline goal, and even how many calls need to be made to get those meetings. Those are controllable behaviors that will lead to the results everyone wants to achieve.
Bruce Bolger from Enterprise Engagement Alliance –
By having clear goals; by having a rules structure that addresses the middle 60%, by promoting the actions that are needed to attain goals; by having continuous communication, learning, community-building activities, innovation and collaboration programs, by carefully selecting and personalizing the rewards experience for each person, and by measuring and feeding back results. Most programs overlook more than one of these basic rules.
It is best to think about motivational tools as a portfolio. Most companies rely solely on incentive pay to drive their sales teams. Their portfolio should also include sales contests and recognition programs that work in coordination with incentive pay. A portfolio approach keeps sales people engaged and motivated.
Christopher Cabrera from Xactly
“A well-built incentive plan tells employees what is expected, and what they will receive in return if they hit the goals,” said Christopher W. Cabrera, founder and CEO of Xactly. “This gives employees both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to reach both their personal and professional goals. A proper plan incentivizes and rewards overachievement of company goals.”
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