How to Use Incentives and Gifts to Motivate a Direct Sales Team

Motivating your sales staff can be done in many different ways. One way is to use incentives and gifts to motivate your direct sales team. This can be done in the way of contests, where they compete against each other, or on an individual basis, where they get rewards for reaching certain goals. Attain your goal of higher sales by understanding how incentives work to motivate your direct sales team.

Instructions

1. Know that the first step in motivating your sales staff needs to come from you in the form of making their success possible. Some examples of this are communicating goals clearly, empowering them to make decisions, and removing any roadblocks that are preventing them from achieving their goals. Unless this is first achieved, most won't be motivated by incentives and gifts.

2. Decide if you want to have your sales staff compete against one another for a period of time to win a certain gift, or whether your type of selling lends itself more to the staff striving to attain or surpass their own previously met goals. Another way to organize an incentive program is to have the sales staff work in teams. This way they are responsible to someone other than themselves to reach a goal so that the whole team benefits.

3. Make their goals achievable. Setting the bar so high that it's nearly impossible to reach won't motivate your sales staff; in fact it will probably have the opposite effect. Encourage them to flex their sales muscles a little, but with goals that are feasible.

4. Consider a lifestyle reward, in the form of extra paid vacation, trips to exotic locations, dinner out to the restaurant of the winner's choice. Most sales people are accustomed to being motivated by money to work harder, so rewarding them with something they would probably never spend money on themselves is a great motivator. Just make sure the reward is enough for the winner to take along a spouse or a friend.

5. Realize that incentives and gifts don't motivate everyone. You might have some salespeople that are motivated in different ways, and it's your job as their manager to determine what will motivate them.