Does your Telesales Incentive Plan need an overhaul (or are you looking to implement your first?)?

Tweet

 

Greg Brown offers some practical advice in his work.com ‘Guide to Sales Incentives’.  His best advice?

Make the program simple. Easy to understand, easy to measure, easy to track.  Provides the incentive to get the job done without having to get bogged down in the details.

Promote it, promote it, and then promote it some more. Leverage the program to the hilt by referring to it constantly.

Track progress publically. This ensures accuracy but, more importantly, it taps into the competitive juices of the Telesales people.

Be sure to have the rewards on hand. Make it real and make sure your reps trust the program by rewarding in a timely fashion.

Don’t let your telesales reps give up, keep dialing the C-Level prospects until…

Tweet

 

In a survey of 205 b2b marketers and a review of the results of thousands of telemarketing campaign records, TeleNet Marketing found that it took an average of 7 calls to connect with C-Level prospects and that it took up to 12 calls to C-Level contacts before daily call returns started to drop off.  The full survey results are presented on Marketing Sherpa, reference article 30060.

Recommendation:  Tell your reps the results are in the numbers.  And be sure that they are armed with targeted voicemail scripts which give the prospect a compelling reason to return the call.

When creating incentive plans, ask your sales people to identify what really motivates them

Tweet

 

As a Sales Manager, are you spending a lot of cycles trying to identify the best compensation plan, the right incentives, the most motivating sales contests?  In his article, ‘Stimulate Your Staff With Questions’, Keith Rosen, The Executive Sales Coach TM, recommends that sales managers ask their sales reps to identify what motivates them.

Here are his suggested questions:

• What do you want in your career that you don’t currently have?
• What do you want to be doing that you aren’t currently doing?
• What are you doing now that you don’t want to be doing?
• What areas do you want to strengthen, improve, or develop?
• What is most important to you in your life/career? What does a successful career/life look like?
• What is the legacy you want to leave behind when you are gone?
• What are the three most important things you would like to accomplish right now?
• What is your plan of action to achieve those goals?
• What do you need that is missing and which prevents you from reaching these goals?
• How can I best support you to achieve these goals? (Uncover how each employee wants to be managed and supported.)

Outside motivators are good, internal motivation is better.