Why is it important to incentivize and reward your sales team for the numbers they pull through on? The benefit is two-fold. First, this helps to increase the number of sales your company pulls in. Second, it helps keep the best sales people around, rather than searching for another company that will better fit their sales career and desire to compete.

Did you know that only about 20% of sales leads are ever followed up? Staying on top of your team and simply reminding them of various tasks they can be doing to complete a sale can often help make a difference. Here are five several tips for properly incentivizing and rewarding your sales team.

How to Incentivize Sales Reps

• Encourage employees to use your CRM so that it’s easier to track what services are being pitched, and how. Level Eleven, a sales company, ran their own internal contest to see whether simply incentivizing pitches would help to increase sales. Employees were given prizes for the number of times they documented making a pitch. Since the offered product was quality, the contest did work — the employees who pitched more for the contest made the most sales.
• Separate employees into teams for incentives, rather than running a company wide contest. Otherwise, the middle and lower end of the pack might already feel like they’ve already lost to the consistently top 10%, and won’t even try to aim for the very top incentive.
• Although some companies offer flat commission rates, more progressive companies have realized that the best team performances occur when a number of different motivational compensation plans are needed to account for the “portfolio of personalities” the company has invested in. Don’t use just one type of motivation and assume it will work for all members of the sales team.

How to Rethink Offered Incentives

So what exactly do you offer your sales force in terms of a reward? Money isn’t the only incentive. As Success points out, when someone is making $200,000, a $2,000 bonus doesn’t feel like much. A year’s worth of housecleaning, or 50 gourmet meals, however, can not only be a weekly reminder that they accomplished something (and would like to again), but it also treats them to a luxury that reminds them of why they like sticking with your company.

How would you incentivize someone with a sales career path? Let us know in the comments.