Offering engaging sales incentives is a great way to boost your team’s productivity and energy levels.
However, simply offering a cash prize to the team member with the most sales might not be enough. Different people are motivated by different rewards, so you’ll need to consider a range of incentives to fully motivate your entire team. Plus, you might need to consider tailoring the goals depending on the staff members’ job position, location or seniority.
In this blog, we’ll cover the 8 main types of sales incentives to help you choose the ones that will be most effective for your staff, your company, and the goals you want to achieve.
What are sales incentives?
First things first, you might need clarification on what a sales incentive actually is. Put simply, a sales incentive is offered by a company when its employees reach specific sales goals or targets.
They’re common in sales teams to directly reward performance and motivate team members to generate more leads or close more sales. Often, specific achievements are linked to specific rewards. For example, closing X amount of sales in a month might translate to a set monetary reward.
An effective sales incentives plan should include cash rewards (for example, commission) and non-cash rewards (such as a paid-for team night out or a new pair of headphones). Here’s a rundown of the 8 most common types of sales incentives.
1. Role-specific sales incentives
This is one of the most common types of sales incentives. Role-specific incentives are tailored to match different roles within a team or company. Different sales team members will likely have slightly different responsibilities, and their targets should align with their exact job roles. This also applies to staff at different seniority levels. For example, a sales manager has different responsibilities than a sales rep, and their targets should be based on their responsibilities.
Consider offering a system of tiered incentives to ensure that your entire team is motivated. This is especially important if you have experienced sales performers and more junior staff members.
Offering a singular incentive for the team member who generates the most leads or closes the most sales will likely seem unachievable to less experienced staff members and will be demoralising to them. Instead, create a system of tiered incentives with achievable targets that most team members can hit and stretch targets to motivate your top performers.
2. Location or product-based incentives
Similarly, you might have sales teams working in different locations or assigned to different markets or products. It’s only fair that the sales incentives are tailored by location or product. For example, if one team works on a new product (or in a recently established location), they might have lower conversion rates than a team working on an established product or location. The sales incentives should reflect what is achievable for each team based on what they’re working on rather than being company-wide.
3. Split sales incentives
If your company has a complex sales process with multiple team members working to close one deal, split sales incentives are the best way to go. This ensures that everyone involved with a deal is fairly rewarded for their efforts. For example, if two sales representatives work together to close a large deal, it’s only fair that both their contributions count towards sales targets. Opting for split incentives also helps to encourage team members to work together and collaborate rather than seeing each other solely as competition.
You must decide to split incentives evenly between everyone involved or reward staff proportionately for their involvement. Whatever option you choose, ensure that you are clear about how staff will be rewarded and how incentives will be split ahead of time to prevent future conflict.
4. Presales incentives
Another option to consider if you have a lengthy or complex sales process is presales incentives. Presales incentives reward staff members at different points in the sales process rather than only when a deal is closed. This helps to keep staff motivated to work towards deals which might take months to complete. Consider offering an incentive when there is an initial meeting with a prospect, another when there is a second meeting or a product demo and a larger incentive when the deal is finally finished.
5. Omnichannel sales incentives
With so many channels involved in the sales process, it’s not always easy to track the contributions of sales representatives. For example, a phone call might be necessary to learn more about a product or service, but the prospect might end up buying directly from the website rather than the team member.
Omnichannel incentives ensure that sales staff are rewarded for all the value and support they offer, even if they’re not present for the actual sale. Deals or purchases can be tracked to find the representative or representatives who were involved in the sale. These representatives focus on rewarding sales representatives for all their contributions, encouraging them to offer value and support to leads rather than solely focusing on the final sale.
6. Analytics-based sales incentives
Analytics-based sales incentives use historical data to create accurate sales projections, which can then be used to create targets and quotas for sales representatives. Team members can be rewarded for behaviours that align with the best practices suggested by past data.
For example, if data suggests that deals are more likely to be closed if a meeting is set within one week after the prospect is first contacted, sales team members can be rewarded for their valuable behaviour. This rewards team members for their actions rather than just the results they get and encourages them to follow the company’s best practices.
7. Cash-based sales incentives
Although money might seem like a boring incentive, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Most companies use monetary incentives as the basis of their commission and sales incentive schemes because they are universal motivators. You don’t need to worry about choosing an incentive that will appeal to your entire sales team, which can be tricky to do. Creating tiered monetary incentives is also simple, as the value can easily be scaled up and down.
Monetary incentives are often linked directly to revenue generated, new leads acquired, or deals closed, making them a powerful motivator for your sales team. You can offer cash-based rewards for any of the above types of sales incentives.
8. Non-cash based sales incentives
Not everyone is driven by monetary rewards, so you might want to consider using non-monetary incentives alongside monetary ones. This allows for more creativity, and you can offer amazing and highly motivating rewards to your high-performing sales representatives.
Here are some ideas for non-monetary sales incentives ideas for what you can offer:
- Sport or event tickets
- Gift cards
- Spa day
- Team dinner or night out
- Extra paid time off
- Remote working
- Paid car parking
- Tech gadgets (such as new headphones)
- Holiday or getaway
- Lunch with company executives
- Award or Certificate
- Professional development, training or mentorship
Bespoke sales incentive programs
With so many different types of sales incentives, it can feel impossible to know which to use to motivate your team. The good news is that there is an easy solution.
At Another Way, we’re experts at creating incredible sales incentive programmes designed to motivate and reward your unique team. A bespoke sales incentive program is the best way to motivate high-performing team members, boost productivity, and increase conversions.
You can rely on our professional and experienced team to create and manage a sales incentive scheme that delivers truly outstanding results!
We offer:
- Group incentives
- Group flights
- Sales incentive program management
- Employee reward and recognition programs
- Incentive web platforms
- Communications programmes
- Programme design and branding
Give us a call at 0778 948 5123 or email us at prizeteam@another-way.co.uk for more information about our bespoke sale incentive programs.
Or complete our online form, and we’ll contact you as soon as possible.
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