When people look at marketing superficially, they often assume it’s only about a catchy advertisement that draws people in, or big brand statements that make the company seem contemporary and in sync with pop culture. And sure, all of these are true to a certain extent, but in reality, marketing efforts are also needed to retain customers in the long term – and for that, you will need to grind pretty hard with a persistent and dedicated sales team. But how do you achieve that? As you might have guessed – by building a sales incentive program that works!
Customer Retention
All relevant studies point out a single fact – it costs far more to convert a new lead into a paying customer than to retain an existing one. That makes customer retention an important goal for any product- or service-oriented company. However, that being said, keeping customers engaged over a longer time period is no small feat. Your customers need to feel like they’re in the loop with your business all the time. And it takes a huge effort, from print and electronic newsletters to website updates.
Consider Your Website
These days, your online presence is definitely more important than ever, so make sure your website maintenance isn’t lacking by outsourcing this task to companies like wpfullcare.com. But it’s not all about the technicalities – the nature of your relationship with your customer base will be determined by the efforts of your marketing team. They need to be on point each day and motivated to reach new heights. They need to do more than work towards a fixed goal – they should strive towards it. It should become more than a company metric, but a personal desire of theirs as well. So, how does building a sales incentive program help here? By promoting the most desirable behavior.
Crucial Points For Sales Incentive Programs
Sure, rewarding your audience is important for marketing, but making sure your team feels like their work is meaningful and worthwhile is just as important. Most of all – you need to approach this in the right way. Don’t work to incentivize a specific result – motivate the behavior that will naturally lead to it. You need to tie the way people work to your sales incentive plan, not just a fixed number as a result. Try to show your team that you value consistency.
For instance, salespeople aren’t big fans of menial work like pipeline updates, scheduling, or time-sheet management. If you don’t want them skipping such tasks and want to incentivize a more diligent approach, make sure your incentive plan takes this into account. You want to reward those who take a thorough approach over the long run.
Avoid Alienating Team Members
Many people believe that the best way to achieve your business goal is to make people battle for the top-performer spot. While this reaps some rewards in the short term by getting you a momentarily better performance out of a couple of team members, in the long run, you might create an atmosphere of unhealthy competition. While this can be a temporary tactic, it’s not a strategy you want to build a sales incentive program on. Instead, you should go for a plan that will motivate everyone on the team to succeed. Look for parameters which could improve your entire team, and help transform it into a fully productive unit. In fact, the people you should try to motivate the most are the below-average and average members, as they have the potential to improve their performance the most.
Time Is Of The Essence
Obviously, your sales team doesn’t work in a vacuum and any good manager is aware of that. The objectives of your sales department often have a very specific and narrow timeframe. And that’s something your sales incentive program should align with. So, include some time-sensitive goals, in order to coincide with performance evaluations and sales cycles.
Expect Failure
At the end of the day – failure is a part of work. And no matter how good your sales team is, and how intricate of an incentive plan you’ve devised, someone is bound to miss the mark. But that’s not something that you should punish with your incentive program; it’s something you should plan for and react to properly. Sure, the bottom line may be the most important thing for any company, but down in the trenches, the way to that bottom line can have many rejections, losses, and near-misses.
That’s why it’s good to have a small reward or some sort of acknowledgment for even the worst-performing members of your team; they will try to be better if they know you appreciate even this effort. Consequently, make sure they get more support than the others in your next cycle. Sometimes, rejections can be down to plain bad luck, while other times it’s a fixable flaw in the execution of your sales process.
Best Practices
It’s important to remember that customer retention is a process that requires thoughtfulness and dedication from your sales team – something they won’t provide you with unless they’re properly motivated. Of course, monetary incentive programs are what many companies use, and they’re effective to a certain extent. But beyond mere money, you should make sure that your sales team realizes the importance of their work. People should be motivated by challenging goals as well, and by proper peer recognition.
Basically, if you want long-term customer retention, you need the incentives of your sales team to be personalized. You want them to have more than a job to do. They should view this as a personal goal, something that’s internally important to them. That way, they will be the best versions of themselves when they approach their work.
