Back Contests for you
Harish Bijoor
Motivation is indeed that one big M in selling that can make companies and, indeed, break the back of the best of them. As selling is such a people-focused business, motivation plays a huge role. Selling remains to this day a very person-to-person centric process. A process in which the evangelical motivation of the seller can transmit itself to the buyer in a near viral fashion, if need be! Hence the ultimate need for the big M in all of selling practice.
Over the last 100 years and more, sales managers have created for their teams processes that focus on keeping the team charged right through the year. While many have used money as bait, many others have used much more than money.
One key tool used has been the contest. The contest that pits the achievements of one against another in a competitive environment. The contest that allows for the differential contributions of different salespersons to be measured. In this piece, I will examine the role of the contest in fostering the big M to the benefit of the sales organisation at large.
Ask any salesperson and she will tell you that there have been a hundred contests in her life. Every one of them a largely boring one! And that indeed is the bane of the contest. A tool used to advantage in the beginning, and a tool misused to such an extent that there is an attitude of disgust and cynicism when the next contest is announced!
Typically then, the sales contest is one where an entire team is normally expected to participate. There is just no choice for a start as to who will participate and who will not. The contest is announced for one and all. The target is set. Thankfully, the target is a different number in terms of volume calculated differently for each different territory represented by the salesperson. The targets are challenging, with a percentage increase that is largely a stretch on what is normally achieved. A stretch that is not too far out of reach and not too easy to touch as well, simultaneously!
The prizes are exciting as well. It started with cash. When cash got boring and started looking small, gifts in kind were the norm. The company would buy the gifts in bulk and get prices that were cheap. To the salesperson getting rewarded, the perceived value of the gift remained high and the company saved on money. The gifts then went across the terrain of every possibility. The selling organisation gave away saris to the women and Safari suit lengths to the men. And then there were brass deepams for the house and wall clocks of every variety to go onto every wall of your home.
Large suitcases were a rage as well. The size of the gift was exciting! In came gold! The yellow metal was a lure and a store of perennial value as well! In came the `Indira Vikas Patra,' which offered a face value five years hence which was double the price you paid in their purchase today!
Sales managers stressed out their every nerve and sinew in the quest for the exciting gift item! And then this got boring as well! In came the holidays to exotic lands. That sun-soaked holiday in the Bahamas and, better still, that sin-filled holiday in Bangkok! And then this got boring as well!
As I write this piece, I hear sales-folk out there in the great Indian selling space are bored stiff. I hear it's back to cash! Money speaks best!
Contests for salespersons have reached a stress-point as of now. There is indeed very little in terms of innovation that one offers the sales-folk. And very little investment goes into thinking up the truly exciting sales contest that will have your entire sales force up in excitement and gusto to go! In the bargain, sales managers write excellent self-fulfilling prophesies in the sales contests they organise for their teams. They achieve a standard Hindu rate of growth in sales volumes during the contest, see a dip at the end of the contest period, and recover to old levels of volumes soon after. The contest seems to deliver little! And why not? When you plan to fail, you surely will fail!
(To be concluded)
(The author is a business strategy specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.)
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