And this one time...on the sales floor....

I saw a sales contest ACTUALLY work. Once.

Let's be honest, having sales contests are about as obligatory to a sales team as having pens, a CRM and a laptop. You just have to have them as part of the sales culture.

I'm not really a fan.

I don't like them or recommend them because I've never seen them objectively move the needle for any important metric.

Except this one time.....

A sales manager of ours was tasked with running a contest and knew that I always wanted to try to test and experiment to see if we could actually move a metric and be data-driven so he:

✅ Developed a set of weekly and monthly metrics well in advance.

✅ Measured the baseline of those metrics in previous periods

✅ Created a contest that incentivize both the bottom, middle and top producers (He called it "MRRch Madness")

✅ Then measured the results.

Since he measured a baseline, we were able to see if there were objective, incremental improvements OR NOT. The result was that some metrics moved and some did not. I loved that we kept experimenting and trying!

💡 Learning Lesson: While I don't recommend sales contests as a material part of any tactical strategy to materially move the needle, you're gonna do them anyway.

So if you do, make sure you.

1️⃣ Get clear on metrics to move,

2️⃣ measure a baseline of those metrics in advance of the contest (something to compare the contest to) and finally

3️⃣ create incentives for bottom, middle and top producers.

Has anybody every actually run a sales contest where they were able to actually measure incremental improvements?

Drop it in the comments