Welcome to Q4, the craziest quarter of the year, which has your team scrambling to end on a strong note but is simultaneously preoccupied with planning for the new year. What can managers do to best prepare for their virtual Sales Kick-off (SKO) for 2021?
I’m sure many of you have contemplated how to engage a revenue team that is spread out and working from home—most likely during a significant portion of 2021. It's now more important than ever to prioritize new forms of engagement and team motivators. Naturally, many leaders are considering revamped incentive programs to bolster the company’s commitment to its people.
SalesScreen has made this human approach to sales acceleration a top priority, here are some of the reasons why:
Create a Virtual Marketplace
Every company culture is unique and should be incentivized with comprehensive input that accounts for that team's specific interests. The SalesScreen Reward Shop, for example, allows for customized rewards. So, in addition to the common Yeti Cooler or Playstation 5, manual entries can be made with more creative and meaningful—or valuable—rewards than just cash or gift cards. Here are five unique examples from our clients:
- Paid Vacation Days
- Assign Push-Up Challenges to Co-Workers
- Weekly Walk-Out-Songs
- Team Pizza Party
- Lunch/Dinner With the CEO
Own a Company Specific Currency
Just like chips on a poker table, SalesScreen allows you to produce and hand-out “coins” that can be exchanged for rewards. This creates a variety of ways to implement a long-lasting change in individual behavior and focus on the goals that matter for the business. With a virtual marketplace packed with rewards that each rep cares about, they'll naturally want to push harder and earn the coins necessary.
Here is where the true power of a platform like SalesScreen shines (literally) compared to traditional employee reward or recognition programs. In addition to having the ability to hand-out coins manually as a manager/reward admin, you can create rules that automatically give out coins when the reps unlock any custom achievement/badge, like hitting their quota, surpassing last weeks result, scoring an all-time-high record or booking the fifth meeting of the month.
Instead of giving away cash prizes in competitions and spiffs, give away coins. Heck, implement the Formula 1 point system by tier-dropping the prices in competitions with coins, so that it matters more where you end up on the leaderboard.
Once the rep gets a taste of earning coins, SalesScreen then empowers them with a new dimension: Competitive yet friendly smack-talk. Reps can challenge each other with head-to-head battles with their precious coins on the line. That way, the most competitive team members will have yet another method that drives them. It’s the ultimate dream of any sales manager, reps motivating each other through healthy competition.
Cross-team endorsements are another use case for company-specific virtual currency. At SalesScreen, we see hundreds of endorsements handed out across roles on the revenue team every day. Endorsements allow account executives to praise individuals or executives to reward an entire team with nice messages then transfer their hard-earned coins to an SDR that booked an exceptional meeting or reward the team with an additional coin bonus for a great quarter, for example. Creating a culture of appreciation is the key to success for any revenue team.
Put a Spotlight On Cool Rewards
To make any marketplace a success, you need to use a bit of, err, marketing to your potential buyers—in this case, your revenue team. That's why we allow for so many different ways to visualize and engage with the SalesScreen Reward Shop. If you're lucky enough to work from an office, you can announce new gifts on TV-screens with a bang, have dynamic content that shows how to earn coins, featured popular rewards to hunt for, and just remind everyone why they should go the extra mile.
When you have rewards that are hard to get, you create a reason for people to stick around longer. An example of this using SalesScreen is a feature that allows reps to "favorite" rewards they want to track and see how they progress towards. Let’s say the reward is a Rolex Watch. Naturally, it will take some time to make enough coins to get there, but it will constantly be on their landing page reminding them to strive for it.
You can then limit the availability in the SalesScreen Reward Shop so you don’t "sell" more than you have in "stock," if the premium prize is to meet a famous celebrity over a Zoom call, for example. In situations like this, noteworthy rewards are announced in the company feed as well, showing everyone that now's the time to step on the gas.
So what are you waiting for? With such a turbulent 2020, implementing a new employee reward and incentive program can be just the thing you need to make your upcoming virtual SKO a great success! It's a powerful toolbox that can unlock the next gear in each employee with minimal operational lift.
