When creating a sales incentive scheme, it is very important to analyze what your sales reps want, how they work, and which reward programs will motivate them the most. Not every sales rep wants a monetary reward for achieving a target and without any specific sales plan in place, it can give rise to conflicts among different sales team members as well. Here’s a look at different sales incentive plans that you can incorporate into your organization.
Role-Specific Incentives
Along with different sales methodologies and techniques, your incentive programs can also help your sales reps to feel motivated while working. Role-specific incentives play to the strength of each employee and aim to reward them based on their performance and individual capabilities.
Role-based incentives are a great way of showing your confidence in the sales rep and letting them know that their performance is being monitored, no matter which service level they are in. For instance, if there is a sales superstar in your team that outperforms the average rep and most of the members of the team consistently, rewarding him for achieving the target faster acts as a huge boost of motivation.
This is especially helpful when employees have achieved their targets and tend to cool down. With role-specific incentives, the better they perform, the more incentives they’ll receive.
Split Incentives
There are certain products and services that require sales reps to work with sales specialists, product managers, or other sales reps in order to close the deal. Conjuring a sales incentive scheme that splits incentives can come in handy in these situations.
For instance, you can appoint two sales reps to divide clients in a region and work collaboratively to get prospects on board. With a split incentive scheme, they’ll work harder together to make sure that both of them get the most incentive at the end of a period.
Apart from dividing regions, in some sales, sales reps need to work with the product specialist to thoroughly explain the product or get help from the sales manager in closing the deal. Since there is more than one party involved in this deal, the incentives should be divided as well to promote fairness and prevent conflict.
Presales Incentives
Not every customer comes in to buy a product or service directly. With the availability of so many competitors and other companies offering the same product, it could take a lot of time for customers to decide whether to buy a product and which company to choose.
This can result in the customer asking for demos, testing the product on a trial basis, or talking with the sales rep for long times to understand all the pros and cons of their offering. This presales activity can be stretched for a long time with reps being in contact with prospects for a year and longer.
Being in such a sales journey where the customer is still in the consideration stage can be demotivating for the rep and they might lose interest in the customer. Giving them incentives for even the smallest of achievements will encourage them to keep on with the journey and try to close the deal no matter how long it takes.
Omnichannel Incentives
Customers are now interacting with a product and its company through various different channels. Some might call the company directly while some try to clear out their doubts with the help of an AI chatbot.
While the sales chain has become omnichannel with modern technologies and smart computers playing a big part, they still can’t replace human emotions. Sales reps are still needed to identify clients pain points, listen to their needs, and nurture long-term relationships. Sales reps that make the use of these digital channels to contact a prospect and close the deal should be rewarded as well.
If a sales rep connects with a future client through the help of automated email chains or promotional campaigns, then the rep could be recognized and rewarded for their efforts after lead qualification.
Advanced-analytics-based Target Setting
In a lot of sales scenarios, it can be difficult to understand what the customer wants and what should be the target. This can make it difficult to come up with a fair incentive program.
Using advanced big data and past data sets can help in creating a more accurate sales projection. It will consider the past behaviour of a customer and will also evaluate how the actions of a sales rep helped in closing the deal in the past.
This data is useful for replicating the outcomes through activity-based selling. It focuses more on what a sales rep did rather than what was the outcome and results. By analyzing data, you can understand what works and what doesn’t while dealing with a customer.
Takeaway
Modern sales processes are becoming more and more complex and companies need to come up with new sales incentive scheme to not just motivate the sales team and but close more deals as well. Be sure to align your incentive plan with the goals and vision of your company.
