Winter is coming! And, so is the holiday season. So there is snowfall, holiday shopping, Christmas, Halloween, and new year on everyone’s mind. As a sales manager, you may be feeling the stress of keeping your reps focused on achieving targets. However, in reality, you should welcome these exciting seasonal events into your sales in order to keep your reps focused. They provide the opportunity to introduce new sales contests and sales incentives into your sales environment. So embrace the distraction, and turn it into more sales.

Any event your reps are interested in can be leveraged to help increase their motivation and spur sales. Competitive events like the winter sales incentive programs work especially well. Integrating your sales reps’ performance with the holiday season’s enthusiasm will build on the excitement they already have about the event. This gives them that extra motivation to work hard, aim for better performance and win the sales contests.

So, follow these below ideas to run a winter-themed sales contest to capitalize on your reps holiday spirit:

1. Sales Skiing

Goal: To bring in the most total revenue for a 4-week period

Duration: 4 weeks

Teams: Individual

Points: One point per dollar

Winners: Individual with the most total revenue at the end of 4 weeks

Prize: Winner gets a new pair of nordic skis or other winter-related gifts valued around $300.

Competition Theme: Conduct a skiing theme competition amongst individuals in a team for 4 weeks. Put up a leaderboard where the progress of each participant is represented using a skiing board. The skiing board of the salesperson who makes the most total revenue by the end of the 4 weeks surpasses the rest of the skiing boards and wins the competition.

2. Ho-Ho-Ho-lding more meetings

Goal: To encourage your reps to hold more meetings during the holiday season.

Duration: 3 weeks

Teams: Individual

Winners: Participants who book the most meetings during the contest period.

Prize: Award different tiers of prizes depending on the number of meetings that the sales reps book.

Competition Theme: Run a Christmas Santa-themed competition for 3 weeks and see which of your sales reps book more meetings. Put up a Santa-themed leaderboard where you show the progress of each rep and rewards that they win. At the end of the contest, you can have the manager dress up as Santa and deliver the gifts to the winners.

3. Holiday Gift Swap Contest

Goal: To close more big deals by the end of Q4

Duration: 4 weeks

Teams: Individual

Points: Open one gift for each deal over a certain amount (125%+ of normal deal size)

Winners: Participants who book the most meetings during the contest period.

Prize: Use a few small gifts, some medium gifts and a big gift (ex. Playstation, new iPad, etc.) This way people will want to compete to win the big gift, and they will have to create more activities in order to steal or swap it away from a colleague.

Competition Theme: Run a gift swap competition for a period of 4 weeks where sales reps receive gifts upon closing deals. These gifts range from small to big. Bigger the deal they close bigger will be the gift that they receive. Now, if a sales rep closes a biggest deal so far, then she gets to swap her gift with one of her colleagues who has a bigger gift than her.

4. Spin To Win

Goal: To reconnect with old prospects before the close of the year to set up the opportunity to re-approach with an offer in January of the coming year.

Duration: 1 week, prizes to be delivered before Christmas

Teams: Individual

Winners: 3 winners chosen at random by spinning the wheel (the more tickets, the higher chances of winning)

Prize: Whatever you’d like to put on the wheel for your reps to spin for. Examples include: wine, chocolates, sports or movie tickets, lunch, company apparel, ipads, and anything else you would like to give away as a random prize.

Competition Theme: Run a lottery themed competition where each individual wins a lottery ticket upon winning a customer. At the end of 1 week, 3 winners are chosen at random by spinning the wheel and the gifts for them are also chosen by spinning the wheel.

5. Christmas at the cabin

Goal: To increase the number of meetings booked across teams to ensure a filled pipeline for the start of the new year

Duration: 3 weeks

Teams: Team-based

Winners: Team with the largest cabin at the end of 3 weeks

Prize: Winners get to take off a day early for the holiday break. If it’s within your budget, maybe rent a cabin to hold a fun team-building weekend. Use this opportunity to celebrate a successful year together and conduct leadership development or skills coaching.

Competition Theme: Build a cabin for each team on a leaderboard. The cabin size of a team should increase with the increase in the number of meetings booked by that team. At the end of the contest, the team with the biggest cabin wins the competition.

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