How to Motivate Your Vape Shop Sales Reps: Contest Ideas That Work
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Sales representatives are the bloodline for many vape shops. They are the ones that make the connections with clients, bring in the most revenue, and keep the vape shop going. So how can you optimize their performance? One way is by creating sales contests. But what’s the best way to go about creating sales contests that rewards both top earners and new salesmen? Read on to find out.
Table of Contents:
- Why Use Contests To Motivate Your Workforce
- Which Type of Contests Work and Which Don’t
- Reward Them With Vape Products
- Good Ideas for Sales Contests
- Idea #1: The Most No’s
- Idea #2: Leave Early Fridays
- Idea #3: The Shakespeare
- Idea #4: The Daily Prize
- Idea #5: The Most Improved
- Idea #6: Pair Selling
- Idea #7: The No-Contest Contest
- Idea #8: The Roulette
- Conclusion
Why Use Contests To Motivate Your Workforce
It’s hard to believe, but contests can help motivate your workforce to perform better. With the right contest ideas you can make sure that the poor or average performing salesmen have a great month, increase overall sales activity, and keep the morale of the sales team high. The problem starts when sales team competition ideas are created only to drive more sales. This is when contests become ineffective and end up doing more damage than good.
Which Contests Work and Which Don’t
While it is important to reward the best salesmen, your contest should reward activity over outcome. By rewarding activity, you give a fair chance for everybody on the team to win and might even give the top performers, who have become complacent, a wake-up call which might further improve their performance. For example, instead of making a contest where you reward whoever makes the most revenue in a month (which often only ends up rewarding the best salesmen), you should instead opt to create a contest where the person who makes the most calls, creates the most leads, or even receives the most rejections wins. This gives a fair chance to everybody on the team to win and incentivizes them to work hard no matter where they are in team rankings.
Reward Them With Vaping Products
Since there’s a huge chance that your salesmen are also vapers, why not motivate them with the products you sell. For example, in our store you can find plenty of great vape juices that will entice them to perform better.
Good Ideas for Sales Contests
Well now that we have talked about why ‘most sales in a month’ contests only end up lowering team morale, it’s time for some ideas that actually improve the performance of salesmen who do poorly or teach the ropes to rookie salesmen. In the next sections, you’ll find some of the best ideas we collected online that we think will motivate rather than discourage your sales team.
Idea #1: The Most No’s
This contest idea is simple. It works by energizing underperforming sales reps to as much as possible. The only way they can get denied a sale is by trying to sell. They will go out of their way to make more phone calls, approach more customers, and initiate more interactions with customers. Reward effort, not success.
Idea #2: Leave Early Fridays
This contest idea serves to create camaraderie among the sales team. It energizes the whole department to meet a certain goal in order to leave early on Friday. This idea works because there’s a good chance that the team will be burned out by Friday afternoon and will be putting less effort. But by creating this contest, you energize the team to finish the week strong. Since every interaction and sales count, you will have the top earners helping the underperformers in order for the whole team to meet the goal.
Idea #3:The Shakespeare
This will reward high-performing sales staff but it will also educate the team as a whole. The concept is easy to understand: get everyone to share their closing secrets, whether it is a sales tactic, a phrase, their most effective emails, etc. Whomever comes up with the best way to close and earn more sales, as voted by the whole department, wins. This helps reward the top earners and at the same time educates everyone in the best ways to close.
Idea #4: The Daily Prize
The daily prize has a simple premise: anyone that has the best sales day wins. Since this is most of the time random, it allows for everyone to get a chance at winning. For rewards, buy random top of the line gifts (a new iPhone) or others that are not so top of the line (a mall gift card) and put them in unmarked boxes so nobody knows what the prize is. This ensures the competition won’t be fierce but still competitive enough for everyone to do their best.
Idea #5: The Most Improved
This idea is easy and aimed at the average or underperforming salespersons. The way it works is simple: track the performance of every person and compare their last month to the new month. Whichever salesman improves the most, whether it is a person who only made 2 sales last month and now made 10, or a person who had 10 sales and now has 30, wins. Since top earners usually perform consistently,, the average salesmen have increased chances of winning.
Idea #6: Pair Selling
This is a great idea for top performers to show the ropes to low performers. The way it works is simple: pair the top performers with the lowest performers until the whole sales department is divided into teams of two. Once the department has been broken down into teams, set sales goals for the team. The top earners will mentor the lowest performing salesmen so that their respective teams can win.
Idea #7: The No-Contest Contest
There’s something to be said about letting the sales department know there is a contest going on without telling them the rules. This will keep them guessing what exactly they need to do in order to win and will try to improve in all areas. This can raise individual and collective performance.
Idea #8: The Roulette
This idea is perfect for both top earners, average salesmen, and underperforming reps. Everytime someone makes a certain amount of sales, or makes a certain amount of calls, they can spin the roulette wheel. Where the ball lands determines the prize. Because there’s a factor of chance, the top salesman won’t always win the best prizes and it could take just one lucky spin for an underperforming salesman to win the top prize. This encourages the whole sales team to perform better in order to get more chances to spin the wheel.
Conclusion
As you can see, the contests that you create need to cater to your entire sales team. If you only cater to your top earners by creating contests that reward the most sales, the morale of the team will go down and the system will underachieve it’s motivating goals. This can discourage new hires from participating or make average performers do worse than they usually do. That’s why contests where everyone has a chance of winning and the objective is to create the most activity usually end up boosting the productivity of your sales team.
