Welcome to the second part in this 3-series blog post on sales contest. In the first part we have talked about:

• What a sales contest is and why is it important?

• How to create a sales contest?

• Best practices to run an effective sales contest

If you’re looking for the secrets of running a successful sales contest, we have you covered: Sales Contest Part 1: The Secrets of Running a Successful Sales Contest

In this part, we present to you a detailed design of sales contest to drive a new product launch.

Consider this scenario:

Your company is about to launch a new product. The entire organization is expecting the sales team to make it a success in the market. During a situation like this, sales reps should get excited about selling the new product. Usually sales reps are more comfortable selling the old products as they are used to doing that. So, they do not make an effort to sell the new product to the customers. This is where sales contest plays a crucial role in

• Properly educating the sales reps about the new product

• Building the confidence among sales reps to sell the new product

• Motivating the sales reps to drive the sales of the new product

Having said that, it is important to realize that a sales contest needs to be well designed to get the desired results.

So here, we present to you a step-by-step guide to design a sales contest for your new product launch. This guide provides you a template that you can use to design sales contests for various other scenarios as well.

Let us now dive into the design principles of sales contest for a new product launch:

Step-by-step guide to design a sales contest:

Step 1: Establish Goals:

First and foremost, determine what are the high-level goals of your organization behind launching this new product. For example, if the goal is to increase sales of the new product for the next two quarters, write it down clearly with value-driven verbiage. Mention

• what is the revenue goal per quarter or

• the number of new products

that needs to be sold to reach that goal. This makes the ground for constructing your contest. This also makes it easy to share and gain executive approval.

Step 2: Choose the key behaviours/KPI’s:

Once you have a basic strategy in place, you are now ready to establish key behaviors/KPI’s for the contest. Break down the bigger goal that you establish in step 1 into smaller activities and set them up as input activities/KPI’s for the contest. Remember to choose these activities in such a way that they ultimately lead to your final goal. For example, if one of your goals is to increase sales of the new product, then the logical activities to choose would be:

• Number of new products sold per week

• Revenue generated by selling the new product in a week

Make sure that you focus on not more than 4 KPI’s per sales contest. Ideally, having 2 or 3 KPI’s per contest works better. Making your salespeople focus on a lot of things at the same time only leads to confusion.

Step 3: Choose a scoring mechanism:

Now, determine how you are going to assign scores against these activities/KPI’s in the contest. Customize this scoring to meet your new product launch goals. One of the best ways to do this is by prioritizing sales of the new product in terms of scores.

For example, consider you are about to launch a new product, say SC1. To push the sales of this product, conduct a sales contest where sales reps earn 50 points for selling all the older products. But, they will earn 150 points if they sell the new product SC1.

In case, you have a price range for your product, you can set the scoring according to that. For example, if the product is sold for less than $1000 then the rep earns 20 points. If the rep sells the product for a price between $1000-$5000 then she earns 50 points. This technique effectively motivates the reps to sell the new product efficiently.

Step 4: Add Elements in the Game:

Now that you have a basic structure of the contest in place, the next step is to gamify the contest. This involves adding various game elements like scorecards, challenges, quizzes and surveys to the contest in order to motivate your reps to chase the new product launch goals.

• Quizzes help in refreshing the new product knowledge for the reps on a regular basis

• Challenges create an exciting competition between the reps or teams (individual/team-wise contests) to sell more of the new product

• Scorecards help in keeping a track of the progress of your rep’s performance in the contest.

SmartWinnr provides an easy way for you to create these individual and team-wise challenges and track the performance in a scorecard.

All these elements help in educating, engaging and building excitement in reps about selling the new product.

Step 5: Create Teams and choose a leaderboard:

The next step is to determine what kind of contest are you going to conduct. You can choose to have an individual contest, a team-wise contest or a contest between the teams of two sales managers. Individual sales contests are ideal if you want to assess individual performance metrics. For example, you can use individual contest when you want to measure the number of new products sold by each individual team member. On the other hand, team sales contests are a great way to build comradery and cohesiveness among your team, while rewarding a larger group of people. For example, you can have a contest between two teams to see who makes the highest sale of the new product.

Then, set up the leaderboard according to the contest you have choosen- individual leaderboard or a team-wise leaderboard. You can choose to measure and display the results of the contest on the leaderboard on a daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly basis.

Here is how SmartWinnr creates individual and Team-wise leaderboards:

Step 6: Choose Game Duration:

Another critical variable for your contest is its duration. A sales contest can last as long as an entire quarter or as short as an hour. Since you are building the contest to promote the sales of the new product for a period of two quarters you’ll likely want to run the contest for two quarters so that you can have a solid baseline to measure the results afterwards.

Step 7: Pick Prizes:

Customize and get creative with your prize options to reward the contest winners. While the sales contest taps into the competitive nature of sales teams, prizes are great for added motivation. Ensure that your prizes accommodate everybody’s taste and motivate all the personality types in your team. Also, keep in mind to pick interesting but cost effective prizes so that your budget doesn’t blow up.

11 interesting and cost effective sales incentives you can choose from:

Step 8: Take it live!:

Now that you’ve mapped out a well thought through sales contest for your new product launch, it’s time to schedule it, and present it to your team! Remember first impressions are huge and if you want this contest to be a rallying point for your team, you need to pitch it with enthusiasm. Consider setting up a meeting or drafting a compelling launch message to your team. With the right approach, your employees will be motivated well beyond the end of the contest and the results will garner notoriety at the executive table.

Here are some exciting ideas to launch your contest and create the best hype ever

So, there you go: This 8-step guide will get you the ultimate sales contest that drives desired results for your new product launch.

Looking for more in Sales Contests?

Sales Contest Part 1: The Secrets of Running a Successful Sales Contest

Sales Contest Part 3: 9 Proven Sales Contests that Drive Productivity

Searching for a Cheat Sheet to run your sales contest?

Cheat Sheet to run a Successful Sales Contest

Excel sheets make for a slow-moving contest. Why do you need a sales contest software?

Why do you need sales contest software?

Which functionalities are most important in a sales contest software?

How to find the Right Sales Contest Software?

SmartWinnr: The Leader in the Sales Contest Software

SmartWinnr is an AI-powered gamification platform that helps you to improve your sales team’s knowledge and performance by up to 60%. You can run the most effective, hassle-free, and automated contests with SmartWinnr. No tedious excel calculations, live leaderboards updated at real-time, automated nudges keep the contest engaging and exciting.

Curious to see SmartWinnr in action? Book a demo with us today!