Reward Sales Performance

In life, business, and sales, everyone wants to feel like a winner. How do you get the winning feeling? Simple. You win and you get rewarded for your win!
Whenever you accomplish a goal or achieve something worthwhile, such as making a sale or hitting your quota, you feel as if you have just crossed the finish line. You feel like a winner. Each time you succeed, your self-esteem and self- confidence go up. You feel great about yourself. That feeling is perhaps the greatest reward of all.
There are other rewards for winners.

Money Motivates

The most obvious reward is money. Money connected to achievement makes people feel happy and successful. Earning lots of money based on your own efforts is a perpetual source of drive and enthusiasm. Money is meaningful because it can buy cars, clothes, better homes and apartments, status items, and an enhanced lifestyle.
Whenever business owners or sales managers ask me how they can motivate their people without giving them more money, I tell them that I have no idea. Salespeople think about how much money they are earning, how much they have, and how much their lifestyle costs all the time.

Make People Feel Important

Another major reward is status. Everything that you can do to raise the status and prestige of your salespeople as the result of their making sales motivates them to make even more sales in the future.
Every year, the best companies present prizes, awards, certificates, trophies, plaques, and other awards to their highest-performing salespeople. They usually present them in large meetings and award ceremonies so that others can see the winners and be motivated to be up on that stage themselves sometime in the future.
It turns out that the faster you acknowledge an accomplishment, the greater will be the boost in self-esteem and self-confidence, and the more likely it is that that behavior will be repeated. So, when someone makes a sale, you should make a big thing of it right away. You should thank your salespeople, congratulate them, shake their hands, and express your appreciation and admiration for their accomplishment that very day.

Brag About Them

A powerful way to reward people for higher achievement, and to build their status, is to brag about them to other people, in their presence. When one of your salespeople makes a good sale or gets through to a difficult prospect, you should take that person to the “big boss” in your company and tell the senior executive what a wonderful job this person has done and how he or she did it.
When you stand there bragging about your employee to someone else, while the salesperson stands right there and listens, that employee will feel even more valuable and important—and more motivated to repeat the behavior that you are praising him for.

Recognition is another powerful motivating influence. They say that athletes, especially runners, perform at their best and break records more often in front of large audiences rather than small audiences. There’s something about the applause of a huge crowd that causes athletes to perform beyond anything they’ve ever done before. Most records for most athletic events are broken during the Olympics, when millions of people are watching.
Look for ways to recognize, reward, praise, and encourage sales performance, and whenever possible, do these things immediately after the sales result has been achieved. The faster that you recognize and reward people for their performance, the more likely it is that they will repeat that performance.

Pay Attention to Others

An effective way of rewarding sales performance is through attention. Personal attention by the manager and other top people in the company is a big motivator. We always pay attention to people who we most value. The more attention that you lavish on people for achieving sales results, the more valuable and important they feel. Their self-esteem and self- confidence go up. They are motivated to repeat the performance.
How do you give people the gift of attention? You spend time with your top salespeople. This is a valuable use of your time, far more important than paperwork. Whenever you have a choice of spending time with one of your salespeople or taking care of busywork, choose the salesperson. The other work can wait.
The rule is to spend individual time with your top performers and group time with your average performers. Top performers highly value one-on-one face time with their bosses. This is considered to be a reward that they will strive to earn by hitting ever-higher sales targets.

Offer Promotion and Advancement

Promotion or advancement to a more responsible position is a major motivator for salespeople. It makes them feel special and important. They feel more like winners. Any suggestion or opportunity that you can use to help your people move up the corporate ladder is a powerful motivator.
Many salespeople hope to advance into sales supervision and sales management in the future. But be careful. Most excellent salespeople are not good managers, and advancing a salesperson into management can actually be harmful to the individual and to the company. You can lose a good salesperson and acquire a poor manager—a double detriment.

But there is something else that you can do. You can have different rankings of salespeople such as Sales Consultant, then moving up to Sales Associate, then moving up to Sales Executive or Senior Sales Executive. You can promote salespeople up through the sales ranks.
You can create a range of titles, like in the military, that people can aspire to, and have their new titles printed on their business cards as they achieve certain sales goals in their careers. This can act as a powerful motivator for increased sales activity and sales success.

ACTION EXERCISES

1. Identify your top salespeople, the top 20 percent who do 80 percent of the business, and decide on one behavior or action you are going to practice to personally recognize and acknowledge them, preferably in front of others. Whatever you decide, put it into practice immediately.
2. Think about your average or problem salespeople and determine one behavior that you can practice that might help them move ahead and motivate them to perform at higher levels. Whatever your decision, do it immediately.