Tips for Building a Competitive Sales Team That Produces
Competition brings everything up to the surface – including the good and the bad. But if you know how to instill a sense of healthy competition in your sales team, you can do so in a way that exposes the good and filters out the bad. You just have to know where to begin.
Competition, Motivation, and Sales Performance
If you look at sales performance and study what the most successful individuals and teams do, you’ll notice that they’re different in a few key areas. In particular, you’ll notice they have motivation oozing out of their bodies. And this is not a coincidence.
As consultant Maurcio Kigiela says, “Salespeople need motivation to achieve their goals, serve clients well, and succeed in sales. However, they can lose their motivation due to a number of factors, such as stress. It is up to you, as the manager, to resolve this problem as motivation must be nurtured in every salesperson.”
Motivation is intrinsically planted within each person. However, it must be cultivated. As a manager, it’s your job to take that baseline level of motivation and supercharge it. One of the ways you do this is by creating a competitive environment where people feel driven to produce.
Competition is just one of the many ways organizations drive their sales teams to perform. However, it’s usually thought of as one of the most effective. Benefits include:
- Increases motivation. As humans, we’re always ranking ourselves against one another (consciously and subconsciously). We like to know where we stack up, who is superior to us, and who is inferior. For better or worse, right or wrong, that’s how we think in group settings. Competition taps into this core identity issue by ranking people using an objective measurement scale. This increases motivation to perform better.
- Stirs up innovation. When someone is motivated to compete, it causes them to try and do things that they otherwise may not. This can increase innovation and lead to better processes, strategies, and sales tactics within your organization.
- Eliminates complacency. Competition is designed to push people outside of their comfort zone. It eliminates any trace of complacency and forces people to reach higher and higher.
It’s worth noting that competition happens on a spectrum. There’s healthy competition and unhealthy competition. What separates the former from the latter is the emphasis on encouragement and mutual success. In a healthy competitive environment, there’s a mutual appreciation for one another. (Whereas, in an unhealthy competitive environment, people will push others down in order to elevate themselves.)
In this article, we’re focusing on how you can create healthy competition within your team as a way of driving up motivation, which subsequently impacts sales performance in a positive way.
4 Tips for Creating Healthy Competition
As you think about how to create healthy competition, here are a few tips and strategies that will set you up for success:
1. Hire the Right People
Creating healthy competition begins with hiring the right people. You want people who are competitive and assertive (but not aggressive). If you’re building a sales team from scratch, or if you’re adding multiple people to the team, here’s a method that usually works pretty well:
- Post the job opening and make a short list of the most qualified prospective hires.
- Invite the top 10 to 12 individuals to a group interview.
- Spend the first half of the interview selling your company and why it’s a great place to work. (Talented salespeople always have multiple options, so it’s up to you to convince them that you’re a good fit for their skills.)
- Spend the next half of the interview leading discussions, asking questions, and observing how the group interacts with one another.
- At the end of the interview, pick out the top two or three people from the group and ask them a simple question: If you were hired, what person in the room would be your first hire? Their answer to that question will tell you a lot. Highly-competitive A-players will want to surround themselves with other A-players who have skills. Aggressive individuals who are only focused on themselves will tend to gravitate toward weaker people whom they see as prey.
2. Launch Competitions
Sales competitions are the best way to bring out the competitive spirit in people. The key to competitions is to time them well so that there’s always a drive to perform. One way to do this is by stacking the goals.
For example, you might have daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual competitions. Each competition stands on its own merit, but they also contribute to the larger competitions. For example, you might reward employees with a $20 cash prize for having the most sales in a day. But this total also counts toward the weekly prize, which goes toward the monthly prize, etc.
3. Use Awards and Incentives
Competitions don’t always need monetary incentives attached to them. According to one study, 65 percent of employees prefer non-monetary incentives and will actually respond better when there are non-cash awards. If you’re looking for sales recognition awards and trophies, here are some ideas:
- Crystal Summit Sales Club Award Trophy
- Crystal #1 Sales Champion Award Plaque
- Crystal Diamond Salesperson of the Year Award
The beauty of these awards is that you can personalize them in any way you please. This makes them an extremely versatile tool for motivating team members to succeed.
4. Compensate Team Performance
While the bulk of a salesperson’s commission is always going to be tied to their personal performance, there’s something to be said for connecting a small percentage of commission to the collective team’s results.
Sales reps are always going to aim for their own individual goals, but you don’t want them to get so focused on their own targets that they undermine the team. By tying commissions to team results, you encourage a healthy and supportive dynamic.
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