Some of the most successful companies use incentive programmes to motivate their sales teams. However, you need more than just an incentive to achieve results. This blog explores how using the right sales incentive technology can help you to achieve your targets.
What makes a good sales incentive website?
Set clear goals
Define the specific goals and objectives prior to building your website so you can more easily set the touch points you want the users to experience during the coming months. Ensure you have the website ready for the launch of your incentive and use it to clearly communicate those goals to your salespeople. Plan your first few weeks of email and website interactions ahead of going live so that you have time to review how the site is working post-launch without needing to focus on producing new content. Being clear on your desired outcome from the start allows the incentivisation of your salespeople to be targeted and measurable from the beginning.
Choose the right technology
Using the right technology enhances your sales incentive and increases performance and allows you to creatively communicate your incentive with engaging content to your users. To get the best out of your website, consider including the following:
- A dashboard showing user performance against individual and company targets, with league tables to track national and regional performance
- Familiar social style feeds communicating latest news, promotions, training, and highlighting ‘topics of interest’
- The ability to log or claim sales, with either automatic or manual approval by management
- Rewarding a user for a variety of metrics and performance led criteria, including completing learning modules to test brand and product knowledge, quizzes, games, and watching relevant video content
- Integrating with a 3rd party reward store, using generic e-codes, a branded store card, or a branded Mastercard, to allow rewards to be spent
- Surveys to get useful feedback on what does and doesn’t work for the end user
Track your progress
This should be at both a personal and company level – consider also team and region. Clearly show the level of progress on your sales incentive website and link this to what the user needs to do to achieve their personal goal and the company targets. Segmentation allows you to run different campaigns, measurements, and mechanics on the website for different audiences. This better helps incentivise and reward salespeople based on their individual performance, responsibilities, and differing customer bases, by being able to set different targets that need to be met.
Evaluate and adjust
Don’t be afraid to make changes if your sales incentive results are not going the way you want them to. Always be open to adjusting the incentive to bring it back on track – tactical spikes mid campaign can avoid potential lulls. Use games, double points, spot prizes, and movable icons on the website, to keep a high level of interaction and leverage your technology to support this. Keep evaluating your incentive website to ensure that content is well laid out and it is generating interactions with your users in the most efficient way. You should never build an incentive website and then think your work is done. The technology should be agile, easily customisable, quick to roll out, optimised for mobile and desktop, to ensure you are able to quickly adapt.
Be informative and keep the conversation going
Provide people with key information in their local language, draw them back to your incentive website to interact throughout the duration with marketing emails, incentive campaign updates, promotional videos, learning modules, quizzes and gamification. Make the incentive website the place to go to for everything they need, and you need, to achieve targets.
Celebrate success
Recognise and celebrate achievements by using the incentive technology to issue awards, badges and instant gratification. Highlight performances with leaderboards and share success stories with website notifications to motivate and keep people engaged. Don’t just focus on top performers, give everyone a chance to succeed through learning and quizzes, with financial, shout out, or physical incentives to complete. Keep the competition healthy, encourage engagement and keep inspiring people to interact and achieve.
Incentive reporting
A good incentive reporting tool will provide you with a single place to capture everything you need to manage your sales incentive. Show people their sales progress via the website, make use of company, regional, or country leaderboards. Having instant information available at the touch of a button is the most powerful of tools.
Data dashboards
Have access to branded insight dashboards throughout the incentive, to track and monitor individual and company performance. Tailor dynamic dashboards to filter by key information such as team, region, or country, to give you an interactive tool that drills down to the most important data you wish to see.
How can FMI Agency help?
We are an innovative, agile and technology-led agency working for some of the world’s biggest brands and can tailor sales incentive technology specifically to your needs. Our technology solution is more than Software as a Service (SaaS) it is a fully customisable modular platform that is cost-effective and quick to set up. Underpinned by a team of sales incentive experts to support you on the successful implementation and ongoing management of your incentive programme.
If you are looking for a comprehensive technology solution to drive engagement with your sales incentive then get in touch with our programmes team.
