Sales contests create a healthy competitive environment in your sales department. According to the 80/20 rule, only 20% of sales made by salespeople make up for an overall 80% of the company revenue. So, it only takes the motivation of that 20% to provide the long-term exponential benefit.

A sales contest is one of the best tools in your arsenal to spark that motivation in your team. It is also important to make your contests creative and interesting. This ensures that your audience are engaged in the contest and work towards winning it. The first thing about a contest that sparks your salespeople’s interest is its name. So, choose a creative and capturing name for your sales contest from the list of ideas below provided by some of the best sales managers in the field. We have broadly divided those contest ideas into three important sales categories:

• Leads and Prospects

• Sales Targets

• Salesforce Adoption

Use these for inspiration on creating your own sales contest, helping to result in better profits.

Leads and Prospecting

Following are the contests that focus on driving improvement with respect to scoring leads and prospects:

1. Fish for Leads

If your prospect list is long and hasn’t been touched in a while, start a competition for who can turn the most leads into clients. Make everyone contact a minimum number of leads every day. The winner is the person who has the most conversions during the contest period. This person should get a fishing-themed prize, whether it be a fishing trip, fresh lobster shipped from Maine, or a fancy sushi dinner.

2. Name Your Team

Conduct this contest amongst the people of a team and have them compete against each other. The competition could be about anything that you want to achieve like– number of calls, number of meetings or number of conversions. The salesperson who makes the highest number of calls in a month, for example, wins this contest and she gets to give the name of her choice to her team.

3. Driving For The Hole In One (Hour)

This is a power hour competition where your team has one hour to call as many leads as possible in that hour. Award points for logging calls.

4. Pirates of Treasured Leads

Create this contest around generating as many leads as possible when releasing a new product out to the market. Provide all the participants with pirate hats and tattoos, too!

5. Arrrrsk for Referrals

The name of this contest is based on the pirate’s theme. Participants will be rewarded for creating referrals. Create a contest where participants in 2nd place are able to choose a sealed envelope containing different options for getting the person out of first place (e.g. deducting a certain amount of points, awarding bonus points, etc.). Give all the participants pirate hats and tattoos, too!

For prizes, buy a treasure chest for the office and stock it with various gifts, big and small for winners to choose from.

6. Strikeout the competition

Run this as a quarterly or yearly competition where your sales reps will get rewarded every time they successfully convince a prospect to go for your product rather than your competitor’s product. The prices could be– gift card to a local bowling alley or bowling set for the office or home. You can also make this a team contest and take the winning team out for bowling night.

Sales Target

The below contests focus on motivating your salespeople to achieve certain sales targets that you are aiming for:

7. Balloon surprise

If you want to insert an element of surprise in your sales contest, take the help of balloons. On the scraps of paper, write what prize the salesperson wins and, and stuff them in blown-up balloons. The prices should range from small to big. Every time a goal is met or a sale is made, let your staff member choose his own balloon. He won’t know what he wins until he pops it.

8. Everyone Wins

When you’re looking for sales contest ideas to boost office morale, set a goal for the entire team to win, not just one salesperson. If your office hits whatever goal they set for the month, everyone in the office wins a prize. This will get your staff to help each other and work on improving their performance. This would attract much more interest from your folks if you let them choose the winning prize before the competition begins.

9. Close Now, Wine Later

This would be an inspirational contest name for the salespeople to close more deals. Basically, this is a six-month contest and the salesperson who closes the highest number of deals at the end of 6 months wins a chance to go on a weekend trip with his family to a vineyard.

10. Show me the money

This famous quote from the movie “Jerry Maguire” makes a great contest name. This urges salespeople to hit a certain revenue target in a quarter or year. Whoever hits this target first wins the contest and gets rewarded. This can be conducted as a team-wise contest or an individual contest.

11. Survey Your Customers

Most often, sales contest winners are determined by set goals or management decisions. How about you change that and put the entire contest in your customers’ hands? It’s always good to survey your client-base about your company’s performance. The team or salesperson who gets the best customer rating wins the prize.

12. Sales by Day – Monopoly

Charting sales by day is another method of recording. Try a Monopoly-style game. Each day that staff members meet a sales goal, they “pass go” and collect a prize – phone cards, lottery tickets, gift certificates or free lunch tickets, for example. Use cars or Monopoly pieces to chart progress on a poster. When an associate exceeds a goal, he can “buy” property – a chance at the final prize. When the contest is over, the player with the most “real estate” wins the grand prize.

13. Sales Per Hour – The Horse Race

Whether your sales staff sits at phone stations or goes out on the road, one idea is to chart sales by the hour. This can be done by staging a mock horse race. Posting the progress of the sales information throughout the day can spur slower sales staff members to be more productive. You can post the progress of the sales– team-wise or individual-wise. Run this contest for three days. The sales associate with the best record wins.

14. Who Wants To Be A (Insert Company Name)-aire

This name’s inspiration is taken by the hit tv show “Who wants to be a millionaire”. Run a parent/child contest here for one month with each week representing a different behavior and rolling up to the parent contest. Award small prizes for the weekly winners and a bigger prize for the month-long winner.

15. The Retention Squad

Some sales are prone to cancellations within a certain period after the purchase. You can run a sales contest that focuses on retention. For example, sales that are made and kept after a certain period, like 60, 90, or 120 days. This contest name represents a fun way to stay focused on that goal.

16. Winners are the masters

If contests are a regular part of your sales strategy, here’s one way to shake up the atmosphere. Allow the winner of your current contest to choose the next contest that you are going to hold. Let them search through your sales contest ideas and pick whichever they like best. Your staff will work harder to have the upper hand in the next round of the competition.

17. Sales Pursuit

This is based on board game trivial pursuit. Make this a team-based competition rewarding the team with the highest sales for the competition. Also, award bonus points each day for the team that correctly answers a question from Trivial Pursuit (a question about one of your products, your organization, etc.). The winning team gets a trivial pursuit board game or take them to a place that hosts trivia night.

Salesforce Adoption

These contests help in effectively driving salesforce adoption in your sales department

18. Blurry Vision? Put In Your Contacts

Create a contest around Salesforce adoption by getting participants to fill in/add contacts on their accounts.

19. Data Cleanup

This contest rewards participants for cleaning up old opportunities (updating the sales stage to “Closed Lost” with a reason for the closed opportunity).

Other ideas include updating the status of current contacts (no longer there, retired, deceased, etc.), adding account web sites and/or adding competitive presence at an account (if applicable).

20. Hasta La Vista

This famous quote from the movie “Terminator” can be a really good catchy name for a sales contest. Basically, here you create a contest around updating the status of contacts to reflect who is no longer at an account

Looking for Diwali-themed sales contest ideas?