Advice and Tips from Tim Peniston-Bird, Founder of Orangutan, and an expert in Sales Incentives
Most people going into sales are looking for kudos compared with say working in Sainsburys’ – this is why it is much more aspirational to work on a leading or prestigious brand. This means that everything we do must look to increase their self worth and give them opportunities to get recognition both in the workplace and in social opportunities such as in a pub – what we call ‘pub kudos’.
Working in sales can have many moments of boredom and isolation – promoting a sense of belonging of a wider community, having a friendly voice at the end of a phone line who will help, encourage and motivate them can be key.
We often find that our hotline and chat operators are acting as a quasi Sales Manager where, when participants they are bored, get in touch to find out what’s happening on incentives – which gives us an opportunity to engage them, suggest solutions others have tried and been successful and send them away motivated to achieve.
Motivational programmes should be motivational themselves – fun to participate in and providing recognition simply for taking part. Frequent use of interactive online ‘games’ can make these fun to take part.
Quality – by building in qualitative factors, it means that the ‘pub points’ are higher ‘I won because I am professional’ not some dodgy second hand car sales person.
Typically sales people will enjoy ‘bucking the system’ – we frequently build in opportunities for them to feel they have cheated and got one up on us …. but to have the opportunity they have to sell.
One upmanship and a fear of being seen as a failure is a key driver – frequent small winners events where they have to be seen to be there and larger numbers of small league tables where they are battling to get off the bottom and aspiring to get into the next table are key.
We are far more motivated to retain something that we feel we have than to get something new so where possible tell them what they have got and what thy need to do to keep it.
The audience are in a fast moving consumer world so feed off continuous instant gratification. Even if you need to validate or allow sales to cool off, tell them what they have won straight away with the prize issued once the cooling off period has passed.
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