Should you have sales incentives?

The age-old debate is should sales professionals need incentives?

The common answer is no they shouldn’t, they should be self-motivated to earn commission, yet nearly every sales leader we speak to admits to using incentives regularly. Why?

The answer is easy. In the quest for targets, stretch targets and stretch, stretch targets sales leaders need every trick in the book to get their team performing at the optimum levels required.

There are 2 key incentives Cash v Non–Cash Incentives.

If you’re in sales you probably like cash, and the promise of even more cash is likely to always be a strong driver. Yet, non-cash incentives offer a lot more flexibility and creativity for things employees wouldn’t normally spend their money on, such as dinners out, sporting events or travel.

Incentives can be such an exciting thing. Teams united, working towards a common goal with epic rewards as the reward. They absolutely can work resulting in huge impacts on performance and productivity.

But there is a danger. How often do teams and employees become so engaged with one incentive that when it finishes productivity, engagement, enthusiasm, and all-round performance suddenly drops.

The incentive has become the expected. Now the onus is on the Sales Leader to provide another incentive, one which is of equal or higher excitement.

Before you know it, costs are spiralling, and more importantly employee self-motivation has dropped. Employees are now reliant on their peers, managers and incentives to drive performance - essentially external motivators.

Every Sales Leader wants their team to be self-driven, so how do they do this? Can employers risk cancelling incentives, even though we know it ultimately damages self-motivation?

The answer might be simpler than thought……

In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs we know one of the biggest human drivers is belonging and love. Making employees feel loved, valued, and recognised is the quickest and most powerful engagement tool. It also delivers the most consistent high-performance results as the employee is driven by internal motivators.

It may appear really obvious, but if sales leaders are truly honest how often do they really get to know their employees, how often do they understand their tigger points and the best way of communicating with them? No-where near enough is the answer. The sales rat race, the drive for targets, the drive for success means most managers end up driving extrinsic motivators rather than intrinsic. Basically, the wrong motivators.

So perhaps before booking in the next incentive sales leaders should sit back and think is there a better way of doing this?

Is there a better balance to achieve motivation utopia?

The reality here is that everything is unique and personal – some people are motivated by nice shiny things, others strive for recognition or the need to be at the top of leaderboard. Managing sales teams are complicated beasts. Sales leaders have got to navigate all the nuances in the great puzzle of perfection in the quest to ensure they achieve their core goal – their revenue target. They have to do what they think is right at the moment of time.

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