Increasing sales and incentivizing increased performance amongst your salespeople can be difficult. Sales staff can be easily discouraged by denials on the phone or at the door, a declining economy, or an offseason. Keeping your roofing sales team motivated during peak and valley seasons is critical to the success and growth of your company, but how do you keep teams going?
One great way to boost sales and drive up your numbers is through friendly competition. The concept of gamification,
“…is about amplifying the effect of an existing, core experience by applying the motivational techniques that make games so engaging. When you gamify high-value interactions with customers, employees, and partners, you drive more sales, stronger collaboration, better ROI, deeper loyalty, higher customer satisfaction and more.” [source]
By getting your employees to view their sales job not as a job but rather as a “game” with quantifiable results and rewards, you can boost employee morale and make your employees want to make more cold-calls and sell more projects.
Consider the following tips to encourage your employees to make more sales:
By getting your employees to view their sales job not as a job but rather as a “game” with quantifiable results and rewards, you can boost employee morale and make your employees want to make more cold-calls and sell more projects.
Read: 5 Tips for Successful Communication Between Teams & Staff
Consider the following tips to encourage your employees to make more sales:
It’s Not Always About Cash
Let’s be honest: everyone loves cold hard cash. However, when it comes to incentivizing employees, cash is not always the best or readily available solution. Cash rewards are short-lived and easily forgotten about. Employees quickly spend their performance bonus and then forget they ever had it. In an article by Glassdoor, Donna Fuscaldo writes,
“According to compensation experts, the reason non-cash rewards work is because with it comes recognition of a job well done. It lets the employer know he or she is important to the organization and can serve as a reminder that the company cares about its employees. Cash rewards are gone quickly so they aren’t something the employee will look at a year later and remember why he or she has that TV or coffee mug.” [source]When running a competition to bring on more leads and sign on more prospects, consider choosing a non-cash reward.
“Microbonuses” based on a point value systems can be used to redeem for prizes like gift cards, extra PTO or dinner on the boss – whatever incentivizes your roofing sales team to do more! These rewards will all serve as consistent or ongoing reminders to the winning salesperson of their job well done and to keep up the good work. [source].
Keep It Friendly
A little competition amongst employees is healthy, as long as it’s friendly. Sales people are naturally competitive, and inevitably, if gamification is enabled and encouraged, there will be some trash-talking. As a manager, you can encourage this good-natured ribbing, as long as it stays positive:
“Another great way to promote trash talking, as well as recognition, is to display real-time standings throughout a competition. Nothing motivates contest communications more than watching a colleague rise – or fall – in the rankings. Publicly displayed leaderboards can also provide an excellent way for employees to keep competitions top of mind.” [source]
If the contest gets too intense, people’s feelings or egos can get hurt in the process, resulting in discouraged employees and a hostile work environment. Keeping the competition engaging and fun is the only way to come out of it with the results you hoped for. With angered, offended employees, your competition could result in the complete opposite effect of what you intended.
Using a CRM to Help Facilitate Game Culture
Enabling gamification within your roofing business management software is another way to promote the gamification concept and keep competition up to date.
“Leaderboards can inspire your competitive workers, while also fostering a sense of “social relatedness” between team members. Some have weekly or daily challenges, bringing friendly competition to what might otherwise be another boring day in the office. [source]
The benefit of a leaderboard is also two-fold for management teams. Leaderboards provide real-time progress, allowing them to keep an eye on sales performance, and a particular roofing sales team that may need additional resources or private encouragement.
“A worker won’t need to wait for their performance review or a one-on-one to find out they’re falling behind other workers; they can see it for themselves, and hopefully address it before management needs to get involved.” [source]
Read: How to Get Your Employees On Board with Roofing Technology
It’s Not All About the Prize – Recognition is Key
Being able to see and publicly congratulate your sales people on good performance helps make their efforts feel recognized, not only by management, but by their peers as well. According to a study by Forbes 100,
“Overall, 37% of respondents stated that more personal recognition would encourage them to produce better work more often. While other themes like autonomy and inspiration did surface, recognition was the most dominant, illustrating the importance of affirmation, feedback and reward for motivating employees to do their best work.”
Gamification is a tool that managers can use to help promote this recognition, incentivize performance, and help generally enhance the company culture for sales teams.
Utilizing gamification can have fantastic results for both the performance and the morale of your roofing business. Understanding what your employees want in a workplace environment, recognition of work well done, and appropriate compensation for performance should all factor into how you incorporate gamification into your platform. Done correctly, roofers see more engaged sales teams, better overall performance, and greater profits to your business.
