Why Your Sales Incentives Don’t Work and How to Make Them Awesome with QoreBoards

IaaS is the hottest thing in big data and organizational change, but it falls short. It acts global when you need local. IaaS offers valuable data and actionable insights, but for those to matter, they need to mean something to the people who benefit most from them: your team members. That means they need to be more than data dumps or general insights. Your agents are begging for custom insights that cut down on all those circle back meetings and improve their sales right here right now.

Performance management as a service (PMaaS) does all that and more. It fills the holes left by IaaS and creates an intelligent audience of one that’s granular, automated, and adjusts in real time with real data all the while saving money in operating costs.Training, interventions, and goal alignment are just three of the ways to implement PMaaS in your organization. The system also works to remove the guesswork from incentives by transforming gamification.

Why Your Team Doesn’t Want to Go to Cabo

In my experience, organizations offer sales incentives that match the way they train and lead. They use a blanket approach designed to appeal to the masses. It works – for the most part. But it doesn’t encourage your team to thrive.

See, offering up a weekend in Cabo or $1,000 bonus or whatever it is on your calendar only motivates people to work so hard. For the one person on your team who dreams of going to Mexico, it’s a great motivator. For people who are balancing work, school, families, and trying to get at least four hours of sleep tonight, it matters less.

The truth? Your universal incentives don’t have universal appeal. Not even close. Your incentives might not motivate your team; they may even be inconvenient. PMaaS and QoreBoard can change all that in ways that encourage your team to turn it up to ten – and saving you money.

Using the Intelligence Audience of One in Incentives

The Audience of One concept we applied to performance management translates perfectly into incentives. Data-driven goals feel unachievable and impersonal. They’re too abstract or too far away to mean anything to agents. Add in goals rewarded with something equally meaningless, and you see results slip.Yes, some people will sell. But you aren’t pulling together as a team. There are a few leaders at the front of the pack doing most of the work. You want everyone working in unison.

QoreBoard uses gamification within the program of actionable feedback and micro-adjustments to motivate every single agent to want to win. Personalized incentives help people win eight times a day, and it helps when winning comes with something tangible. By using the intelligent audience of one in gamification, we allow agents to plug in what matters most to them into their Qoreboard dashboard.

Think about it: the thing that motivates Carol doesn’t motivate Diane. Jo doesn’t have the same goals as Dave. So why do we try to tempt them with the same incentives? Qoreboard gives you a simple system to personalize incentives. Each agent can offer up what it is that excites them. Everyone keeps the same KPI, but they work towards a different prize.

Custom Incentives Change Everything

In my own experience, I have personally witnessed a custom incentive turn teams around so fast they almost got whiplash. I worked with one team that saw their sales hit the floor. Previously, they had random incentives like $500 at the end of the month, but even an amount like that is meaningless. For most people, it gets sunk into rent or bills – it’s helpful but it’s not fun. And why work hard for something that isn’t fun? Fun is the ultimate motivating factor. But fun is individual. I told my team members to pick whatever it was they wanted, and I’d buy it for them if they met the sales goal I set. One guy wanted a fishing trip. One of my team dreamed about a trip to Napa to drink wine. Another wanted a Star Wars Lego set. We’re talking about three totally distinct motivating tools.

At the end of the month, we saw the best sales on record. They exploded, and it’s because my entire team pulled in the same direction towards a goal that mattered to them. They could taste a weekend on the water or the wine flights in Napa, and it made them want it. In the end, they all performed so well I rewarded them all with their incentives and began one of the best performance years I ever had in a sales environment.

How We Do It

Setting custom incentives is simple with small teams, but it’s generally been done manually. I wanted to be able to do it with teams of ten, a hundred, or a thousand. So we programmed it into Qoreboards. To see a demo of our solution, give Mike a shout at mike.midgett@qoreboard.com or check us out on the web at www.qoreboard.com

About QOREBOARD, Inc.

QOREBOARD will accelerate performance and drive profit in your organization.