Sales & Selling Skill | Solution | Tips | Idea and Strategy Information and Articles
|
|
|
Sales & Selling Skill | Solution | Tips | Idea and Strategy Information and Articles |
|
||
|
|
Four Easy Steps To Building A Powerful Employee Incentive Program
Want to build a successful incentive program for your company? Have you dreamt about finding ways to have more fun at work and still see BIG results? At the heart of every employee incentive program is the ability to motivate and reward your team for excellent performance. In this article, I will show you four easy steps to build an incentive program that allows everyone to win! Setting objectives: For any type of employee incentive program, your team must feel the goals are attainable and realistic. An incentive program should also fit into your company's overall business strategy and be easy to measure. Using targets such as revenue growth, client retention, service satisfaction and profits, are some of the ways to establish incentive objectives. Lastly, the ideal incentive program will allow each person in your company to feel they have an opportunity to win. Tip From The Coach: To build a powerful incentive program, plan a brainstorming session with your team so they can share unique insight about ways to make the program a giant success. Listen to their input, as they will lead you to the GOLD! Developing a strategy: Be certain your objectives are simple and well defined. Then, do everything possible to ensure your company goals can be evaluated fairly and objectively. For example, your monthly revenue or the number of new sales each month can be easily measured. Once you have outlined the goals to be measured, then build a specific schedule of how frequently you are going to report the progress of your incentive program. For instance, if your incentive program is going to run for three months, then plan on announcing the rankings every two weeks, to keep top-of-mind awareness. Lastly, clearly outline the rules of your incentive program in writing and define the specific time period to be measured. Tip From The Coach: When building your strategy, be certain to focus on win/win. Also, consider what will happen to morale if many participants don't---or can't---achieve their incentive objectives. Establishing awards: Start by establishing your budget for this incentive program by defining the "projected" number of awards to be given. Then, consider the "people profile" of your team to develop appropriate awards that will be memorable and the winners will take pride in receiving. This is another great topic to brainstorm with your team because if you give them an open forum, they will tell you exactly what is important to them and to those they manage. Tip From The Coach: Your team will be most inspired if they feel the incentive rewards are meaningful enough to justify their efforts. Some award ideas? a nice dinner with the President of your company, education/training classes paid for by the company, a paid day off with cash for shopping, a special plaque to reward top performers, special recognition at your next meeting, or a trip to a vacation resort. Evaluating the results: Bravo! Your incentive program is completed and now is the time to evaluate the results and to justify the success of your program. Start by getting feedback from your team by surveying them and asking for their feedback. Ask them if the incentive program made a difference in their performance and ask for any suggestions they have to improve future programs. Then, evaluate if the program helped your company achieve its goals while consider any improvements you would make for the next incentive program. Tip From The Coach: When evaluating the success of your incentive program, look for any side benefits you didn't expect, such as a new spirit of enthusiasm, reduced turnover or increased teamwork. Want to hear more about this important topic or ask some additional questions about employee incentive programs? Fax a note on your letterhead to 435-615-8670 or send an E-mail to ernest@powerhour.com and The Coach will fax/E-mail back to you a free invitation to be a participant on a TeleForum conference call. Author's note: Ernest F. Oriente, The Coach, is the founder of PowerHourŽ a professional business coaching/recruiting service and the author of SmartMatch Alliances?. He has spent 17,500 hours [since 1995] delivering customized training, by telephone, in leadership, traditional/Internet marketing and sales for fast growing sales companies and entrepreneurial businesses worldwide. PowerHourŽ specializes in global distance learning by telephone, using their state-of-the-art conference call system for interactive and dynamic TeleForums. Twice-monthly TeleForums link 10-100 executives/professionals/individuals who are geographically dispersed, in a time efficient and profitable format. PowerHourŽ is based in Olympic-town?Park City, Utah, at 435-615-8486, by E-mail ernest@powerhour.com or visit their TeleForum website: http://www.powerhour.com. To receive a FREE success newsletter, with subscribers in 74 countries, send an E-mail to: ernest@powerhour.com. Recent PowerHourŽ articles have appeared in 4000+ business/trade publications and websites.
|
|
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
Grow Your Business By Increasing the Value of Each Sale - 29 Ideas to Spur Your Brain There are 3 ways to grow any business: How To Improve Your Voice VOICE The Art Of Cold Calling I know, don't groan. You have to do them if you want to get properties and make money. Believe me, I used to hate cold calling. For those of you that have read our book, "Who Makes It Happen: Back On The Road To Success With Creative Real Estate", remember it used to take me an hour to get on the phone and then after 30 minutes I was ready to hang up. How Leaky is Your Sales Pipeline? Does your Sales Pipeline leak? If you answered no, you don't even understand the question. Every business' Sales Pipeline leaks to some extent. The question is: Have you done everything you can to ensure that it does not leak excessively? Do you even know what your Sales Pipeline looks like? Dead Silence From Your Prospect: The Worst Sound Of All Could this be the worst moment in your selling cycle? Create A Killer Product by Writing Your Sales Letter First! You may not realize this, but when if you are in the early planning stages of developing a product, the best thing you can do is STOP and write the sales letter first! Cracking The Billable Hours Ceiling How many of you made as much money as you wanted to last year? Don't be shy; raise your hands. Hmm, I don't see too many hands out there. What would you say is the cause of this gap between your goals and your earnings? Sealing The Deal Over The Business Meal Doing business over meals is a ritual that has existed for centuries. Taking clients to breakfast, lunch or dinner has long been an effective way to build relationships, make the sale or seal the deal. These business meals are essentially business meetings. Knowledge of your product or your service is crucial to the success of the meeting, but so are your manners. Too many people jeopardize an opportunity because they fail to use good dining etiquette. Here are a few basic rules to make the experience pleasurable and profitable. YOUR Future Profits -- Protect Source With CARE At 21 years, just out of Business College, I went into the mail-order business. Spent 4-1/2 years in this venture and learned many valuable lessons about building customer relationships. #1 is TRUST. Folks like to buy from someone who is dependable and responsible.... with integrity.... one who "walks" their "talk". 8 Part Strategy For Constructing Your Advertising Message Strategies to help produce your brochure, advertisment or direct mail. And make it achieve more sales. Your Voice is Your Instrument On an introductory call, your voice is your instrument. During a face-to-face meeting, you have visual cues and body language available to add layers of meaning. On the telephone, you have only your voice and the words that you use. The way that you use your voice can make or break your conversation. To Buy or Not to Buy? Motivating Your Customers to Take Action! All customers have a choice to make. Sometimes that choice is between your product and your competitor's, but sometimes it's not. Often, the customer's choice is simply whether to buy your product or nothing at all. If this is the actual choice your customer faces, it is important to determine this early in the conversation. Doing so will help you to use a tone and message that directly relates to your customer's emotional reasons for considering your product. Mortgage Leads, Choosing the Best Option When it comes to buying mortgage leads, there are many good companies out there for you to research, and many avenues to travel down when considering which lead type will work best for you. How To Dramatically Improve Sales Closing Ratios A closing question asks for a final decision. A trial-closing question is one that asks prospects for an opinion. Trial-closings should be non-threatening questions that ask how your prospective customer feels about what you have presented. Typical trial-closing questions can build in their directness as these examples illustrate: Health Insurance Lead and Health Insurance Leads Health insurance lead generation systems provide a stead stream of potential clients for health insurance brokers. Health insurance leads are considered to be people who may need health coverage to supplement the health coverage provided by their employer. A health insurance lead can also be someone who is self-employed and needs to obtain coverage for themselves or their entire family. Health insurance brokers rely on health insurance leads systems to supply them with enough potential clients to keep their business going. There are a large number of people who either need additional coverage or are in business for themselves and need an individual or family health insurance plan. Store Owners - Five Ideas to Increase Sales 1. Animate your window display. Referrals: Getting Good Business By Doing Good Business Whether you're a conventional sales person, a professional ? such as a dentist or lawyer or doctor ? or a business owner, you've got to have clients to stay in business. There are several ways to do this: either continue to find new customers, keep all of the customers you've ever had, get old clients to return, or get customers to send in referrals. Schedule Telemarketing Time For More Success Telephone canvassing, or cold calling, is the practice of sitting down with a long list of potential prospects you've never met and telephoning them, one at a time, to learn which of them needs what you sell and then arranging to sell it to them. Nine Keys to Make your Sales Copy Convincing Would you pay $12,500 to discover the keys to great sales copy? Maybe not, but Brian Keith Voiles did. And he put it to use for Fortune 500 Companies. You may not have that kind of promotion money, so here are the nine keys for FREE. Be sure you cover all of them in the right order. How to Build A Steady Stream of Customers--Step One The success of a small business depends upon a steady stream of good customers. To build that stream of customer a business owner must examine five critical points in their business operations. This is the first in a series of five articles that examines those critical points.
|
