Energizing sales teams with a people-first strategy

To build an energized sales team, employers should focus on attracting talent, inspiring connection and building workplace engagement. Advancing your sales engagement strategy through a proven approach is also an effective way to increase retention in a field often characterized by high turnover.

Hiring and attracting sales talent is one piece of the puzzle. Evaluating the culture around how your organization recognizes the contributions of individuals and teams is a start to building long-term engagement for your sales organization. Consider these questions:

• Does your sales team feel that their contributions and wins are acknowledged and celebrated?
• How easily and effectively do your sales incentives convert to meaningful rewards?
• Is your sales incentives program a compelling differentiator for your brand?
• Are your incentive tools engaging and relevant to outside sales?
• Do team-building activities align with your enterprise engagement strategy?

In the United States, companies spend $800 billion each year on incentives for sales teams—three times the spend on advertising.¹ After all, incentives unlock motivation and improve performance—and taking a people-first approach to sales incentives and rewards has a profound impact on fostering a workplace culture that supports a contemporary employee experience.

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1. Incentives: What every sales team wants their manager to know

Sales teams value incentives and rewards that provide a clear signal of a job well done. They also love spreading the love. Providing an exceptional lineup of customer incentives gives sales teams the tools they need to help build customer relationships and win deals. Feeling empowered as a sales professional creates positive emotions for your employees and the brand they represent.

Managing an incentive program should be as fast, intuitive and convenient as using a smartphone app—increasing your team's operational efficiency. That's why a channel loyalty program that centralizes your loyalty strategy within a single, intuitive platform is a game changer that provides unparalleled customization options for your sales team and reduces administrative burdens.

• Streamlined administration: Empower your sales team to spend fewer resources on tasks such as buying gift cards and ordering prizes, and more time cultivating relationships and growing your business.
• Real-time customer feedback: Enable your team to gain insights and receive direct feedback from customers through a channel loyalty program that makes it easy to build and implement customer polls and surveys. Participants get rewarded for their time, and your sales team gets the actionable data to guide future interactions.

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2. Feeling acknowledged: The secret to motivating your sales team

Ask your top team members what draws them to sales. Most will say nothing comes close to the magic of closing a deal. Others value forging meaningful connections, solving problems and the feeling of being appreciated for igniting company growth.

These reasons are worthwhile because they light up the reward center in the brain. Smart companies know that sales incentives should extend beyond the standard commission check to energize teams in new, innovative ways.

• Leaderboards: Leaderboards inspire and motivate peak performance through friendly competition—providing performance visibility across teams to incentivizing and reward extra effort.
• Gamification: Gamifying key initiatives can break the log jam. Sales incentives can provide a convenient way to reward points each time that task is done—which can be traded for gift cards, grand prize drawings and other perks.
• Sales contests: Rewarding the top quarterly performances is a given in sales. Contests provide opportunity to reward extra efforts more often and keep your team focused on targeted goals.

To get started, explore proven sales incentive strategies that spark motivation.

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3. Sales channels: A reward strategy that speaks to your dealer network

Providing meaningful reward experiences across different sales channels should be core to every reward strategy. Start with a people-first approach, recognizing that incentives that motivate your internal sales team and your B2B dealer network require unique considerations.

Motivating your internal sales team is straightforward because growing your brand is their sole focus. When it comes to upsells and new product launches, you have a captive, engaged audience.

Finding incentives that resonate with your dealer network, however, requires a different approach to engagement. These members have their own business to grow, so gaining ground with incentives is a matter of making it worthwhile to promote the brand.

A single, enterprise-level engagement platform that lets you tailor your incentives to both teams will streamline your incentive program. More importantly, an engagement platform that keeps the biggest incentives front and center—trips, concerts, sweepstakes prizes, special events and other experiences—will inspire each segment to focus on their biggest goals.

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4. Team building: What resonates with your sales team?

To foster a people-first culture that strengthens retention, employers should be intentional about recognizing and celebrating sales teams for their accomplishments. How can you celebrate their wins, achievements and willingness to improve? Focus on building multiple touchpoints of gratitude and rewards throughout the year.

• Strengthen and amplify gratitude: Keep the energy going by using one-on-one time to set and track goals, solve issues and celebrate victories, acknowledging accomplishments through expressions of appreciation. Companies that utilize an employee engagement platform with a digital recognition wall provide visibility of shout outs and wins to the entire team or organization. 69% of employees report that they would work harder if they felt better appreciated at work.²
• Empower connections with community-building networks: Whether your team is in-office, hybrid or working from home, creating a network of opportunity encourages connection and community building—allowing employees to connect over common interests, goals and meaningful moments of recognition.
• Create lasting impact with meetings, events and experiences: From quarterly team meetings to annual hybrid or in-person event experiences, team gatherings to connect and be inspired should be woven throughout your strategy—valuable opportunities to express appreciation and recognize your sales team members.

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Activate your team with people-first technology

To build an engaged and energized sales team, start by advancing the culture around how your enterprise recognizes and celebrates individual and team contributions. With the power to reinforce desired behaviors and keep key goals top of mind, our people-centered technology is a proven and scalable solution to activate and engage your teams.

Contact us to learn more about how Augeo can help your enterprise elevate engagement for your sales teams through our flexible and scalable platform technology.

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¹ Harvard Business Review

² Gallup