sales motivation |

Are you a sales manager who tracks the effectiveness of your individual team members by keeping track of key performance indicators on a spreadsheet?

Would you like to share this data with your sales people and find it tedious to:

email them their individual, personalised stats by cutting and pasting from the spreadsheet?
re-sort all the sales people every week according to their overall performance?

In this case, why not use rise.global to automate these tasks? You need to design your scorecard (sales reports) only once and then you can automate the sharing of the scorecard every week.

The benefits of automating the process and sharing the data regularly are:

all sellers can login via mobile web or desktop to see anytime, anywhere how they are doing
sellers can track history over time – so they can think about optimising their behaviour over the whole quarter, not just waiting to the end of quarter
managers can allocate points to the key behaviours they want to see more of – e.g. a focus on lead indicators such as prospects called rather than lag indicators such as sales achieved. That means sellers are nudged to the more useful behaviours right now.
managers can run “team v team” competitions. That means sellers who are doing badly aren’t disincentivised – every activity still counts to the team total.

Save your spreadsheet as a csv file and follow these steps:

Login to your rise.global profile or if you haven’t already set up a profile, register
Go to “Create ScoreBook” and choose the Blank ScoreBook Template – if you can’t see this template, email support@rise.global and ask us to upgrade your account so that you can have access to this template
Name your ScoreBook, give a quick description and click “Create”

Choose Manual Entry for the source of your sales people (user) data and Email Address as their unique identifier

Navigate to ScoreBook Settings -> User Collector and Click on “Import Users from CSV”. Follow the instructions to import in all the individuals in your spreadsheet.

Goto Score Entries and Click on “Import data from CSV”. Follow the instructions again.

Goto ScoreBook Settings -> Score Algorithm and configure the scoring rules that will consolidate all the metrics into a single score, using our sophisticated ranking methods (one of which allows you to compare apples with oranges!), weights, caps.

Finally, go to Bulletins and click “Create Bulletin”

Et voila

Every week, all you need to do is import in your spreadsheet data, create score bulletin.

You can now share this leaderboard webpage with exactly who you want and make it as private as you like and you can share just the individual score with each sales person rather than the full leaderboard. You can share this report via email, Twitter, on a Big Screen TV display, embed the leaderboard onto your own website, share the link of the leaderboard on the rise.global domain.

As a sales manager you have a pretty good idea of the tools and techniques it takes to be a successful seller.

Often you can see the behaviours that your top sellers are doing, mostly out of habit, that you’d love to see in your mid and lower range sellers.

These behaviours could be the big obvious macro-behaviours – like getting out of the office, picking up the phone and making calls, but they might also be micro-behaviours, those smaller tips and tweaks that over 100 calls would make an incremental difference.

Examples of micro-behaviours might be:

tweeting on social media once a day,
keeping track of customer birthdays,
checking the industry movers and shakers news,
exchanging news with a colleague or
doing extra call preparation.

The micro-behaviours might only result in small improvements for each individual– an extra sale here or there – but as a sales manager, you know that if everyone on the team did them, that would all add up to a sizeable difference.

But, if micro-behaviours are worth considering you still have the problem of how to incentivise them!

After all, most of your sales staff only get out of bed when there’s money to be earned, it’s the nature of the sales function and decades of conditioning from sales motivation programs based on financial rewards.

What you’ll find is that the big behaviours are already heavily incentivised: finding opportunities, making calls and closing deals are all covered within your formal sales incentive scheme. It’s formal because this scheme is compulsory – every seller is measured by it and the commissions they earn are the key reason they come to work.

You may have other mandatory sales motivation programs on top of the commission structure too – for example, I’ve seen many managers circulate a sales leaderboard to encourage competition between sellers and win an additional, local, prize.

But micro-behaviours aren’t valuable enough in themselves to be worth incentivising with cash. So how do you do it and sustainably?

One approach is to run a success tracking program.

In a success tracking program, you help a seller improve professionally by giving good, digital feedback.

To do so, you track, for each seller, the micro-behaviours that you’ve seen work – for example, if you’ve seen digital selling on Twitter make a difference then you can offer to count for each seller how many tweets they did each day.

You can save them the trouble of tracking and reporting the number of tweets themselves.

The exact micro-behaviours you identify will be according to your context and business. Your job as a sales manager is to identify them, make a list and then encourage the rest of the team to apply them.

Don’t forget, you need to offer your team your success tracking service on an optional basis. Don’t position the program as yet another sales incentive scheme or management and monitoring scheme, instead position it as a self-help tool for them to help them get better at selling. By getting better at the micro-behaviours of selling they can be sure that this will improve their results on the macro-behaviours where they are formally rewarded.

instead position it as a self-help tool for them to help them get better at selling.

Another way to look at this is, to think about “lead” and “lag” indicators.

Typically sales remuneration is focused on “lag” indicators – opportunities closed for example. These indicators track how you sellers did in the past but they are difficult for sellers to improve themselves – they can’t magic up sales opportunities to close.

Lead indicators are the KPIs that track behaviours that lead to successful sales (and closed opportunities) – filling the top of your sales pipeline with prospects for example. That’s a surefire way (if not the only way) to increase the number of closed deals that come out the other end.

A good success tracking program focuses on the lead indicators that bring success.

So, how do you go about designing your success tracking program?

You can test success tracking very easily today. These are the steps:

Decide what do you want to track = what metrics matter? How do you weight them or assign points? You might want to ask your team.
Who do you want to track? Are you tracking teams or individuals?
How will you collect the data? Can you automate data collection or will some steps need manual intervention?
How will you distribute the score to opted-in sellers?
How will you track your own success in running the program? Has it contributed to a positive change in behaviour among your sellers?

I recommend heading over to Success Tracking University where I present a couple of courses you can take to learn more about Success Tracking.