Sales is a naturally competitive role that attracts people with a competitive spirit. If you run a sales team, you’ll likely find there are times when you need to inject that extra boost of competition into your team culture. A sales contest or competition is often the best way to harness your team’s enthusiasm for victory with healthy team rivalry.
In this article, we’ll explore when might be a good time to run successful sales contests. We’ll also give you some ideas for sales competitions you can run in your team today.
When should I run a sales competition?
Sales contests can be particularly useful if:
- Morale is low, and you want to give people a boost (especially during an economic downturn)
- You’ve launched a new product or service, and you want quickly to get as much traction as possible
- It’s your peak sales season, and you want to make the most of every opportunity
Every sales professional – from the bright-eyed, optimistic rookie, to the grizzled, lone-wolf veteran – can occasionally use a boost of motivation to improve their performance. Like anyone, even seasoned sales professionals can experience career lulls. Sales competitions are a great way to get your people out of a rut.
Remember not to exclude your most senior, highest performing, or even junior salespeople from these contests. Instead, you should hold various sales competitions (like the ones described in the next section of this article) which allow everyone to take part – and win! Not just the top earners.
11 sales contest ideas and examples
Chances are, you already have incentives like commissions or bonus plans. A good sales contest shouldn’t only focus on the top sellers. Use your sales performance incentive fund (SPIF) to create a contest that everyone can win based on their strengths and contributions to your team’s overall success. There are other important metrics your sales competitors can track and reward.
Here are some sales contest categories for sales managers to consider, along with some guidance on how you can run them in your business:
- Customer retention or winback – It’s well known that acquiring new customers is more costly and challenging than retaining existing ones. This means recurring customer revenue is the company's lifeblood. A Forbes article reports that customers often need to subscribe to a product for between one and five years before contributing profit to the company. It makes sense that salespeople responsible for the most renewals deserve recognition and reward, making them feel appreciated and acknowledged for their efforts.
If you're considering a Customer Retention or Winback contest, you can set up Renewal Rate and Winback dashboards in your CRM platform like Salesforce, HubSpot, or Pipedrive to track the effectiveness of account managers in nurturing customer relationships and preventing contract churn. - Freshman or Newbie of the Year – I recently worked for a company that recognized promising first-year salespeople who may not have the highest closed revenue numbers. Still, they demonstrated they could generate opportunities, win the trust of partners and prospects, and close a respectable amount of business along the way. The Trailblazer of the Year prize was highly coveted by newcomers. A separate “Rookie Leaderboard” can help track progress here.
Rewarding top new hires based on a combination of sales KPIs like CRM activity statistics, pipeline volume, and lead response times might be your best bet for this sales contest, especially if your products and services have long sales cycles. - Top case study earner or positive customer review generator – Success stories and positive reviews are valuable social proof for companies across all industries. Customer video testimonials, success story one-pagers, and reviews on websites like Capterra, G2 and GetApp are powerful sales enablement resources. Gaining enough trust and loyalty to convince a client to go public with praise for your business can pay dividends for years to come. You’d be surprised how happy most marketers are for a chance to speak with customers. Especially ones like me who used to be sales reps themselves.
Sales reps can earn points or digital badges for each customer review or testimonial they obtain, with additional bonuses for high-quality or video testimonials. You can determine how many points a review should rank vs testimonials and written case studies. - Top Upseller and Cross-Seller – Your most experienced salespeople have likely figured out the best ways to increase the value of deals, by selling add-ons like premium support, consulting and training services. Running a sales competition based on successful deal value upgrades will shine the spotlight on seasoned salespeople, and set an example for others.
Create a sales leaderboard that is connected to your CRM and tracks how many deals include professional services, add-on modules, or even top-tier subscriptions. Celebrate your reps who go the extra mile to increase deal margins and revenue. - Most Resilient or Most Improved – Everyone loves a comeback story or a tale of someone who faced great adversity but succeeded anyway. Have you noticed the performance of some of your core salespeople has taken an unexpected turn? Coach them to uncover why their performance is lagging and reward them when they get back on track. When economic or competitive factors threaten your deals, rewarding reps who persevere and find ways to win deals can be a great motivator for all.
Let’s say one of your mid-to-top-tier sales reps had a rough quarter (or two) but rallied to hit quota late in the year. Rewarding their tenacity based on quarter-over-quarter CRM data is a great way to motivate others to persevere when every deal matters. - Most Productive Salesperson – Some salespeople are hunters chasing down big deals, and others are farmers who keep existing customers happy and often sell add-ons or value-added services. You can track the achievements of these team members with digital badges or virtual trophies as they pass performance milestones.
Building relationships, meeting customers, building pipeline and presenting solutions require lots of time and energy. Even if a sales rep isn’t the top seller in a quarter, they may be destined for a great one down the line. If you reward the effort behind the results, it helps your team focus on hunting for orders instead of waiting for bluebirds to drop in their laps. - SalesOps Awards – For many companies, getting a sales order from a customer is only the beginning of processing a transaction and recognizing the revenue. Ensuring contract terms (like payment and shipping terms) are acceptable and pricing approvals are in place can often tie up deals at quarter or year-end. Rewarding salespeople for consistently bringing in audit-worthy business with healthy margins is another great way to reward good behavior and encourage continuous improvement.
- Buzzword Bingo – Salespeople are always encouraged to listen to prospects and customers actively and not to use jargon or acronyms in case they might be confusing. Motivate your sellers to listen to customers attentively by having them check boxes whenever a customer uses keywords during conversations, especially words that signal they see the value in your products and services, and a deal may be on the horizon.
- Raffles – Randomly rewarding your sales team with raffle tickets for a job well done (like closing a deal over a certain clip level, earning a positive customer review, or being an asset to the team) is a great way to boost morale.
Awarding a virtual trophy or ticket every time someone goes above and beyond can build suspense up until a weekly or monthly draw can build your team’s appetite for greater rewards for bigger contests. - Team-Based Contests – Individual competitions and prizes are one way to promote healthy competition, though pitting groups against each other is a great way to foster relationships and shake things up. It might help new hires get into the winners’ circle and build a taste for victory.
Depending on the size of your sales team, it could make sense to run a “Team A vs Team B” contest once in a while. I remember a sales contest like this we held for a software company I worked for, where each team had a couple of senior account executives, a few sales development reps, a customer success manager, and a premium support rep. The shared victory helped multiple territories and lines of business to meet their numbers instead of limiting the success and celebration to one or two. - Team Mate or Mentor of the Year – Recognize the members of your team who go above and beyond by helping their peers with proven tricks of the trade or even helping out on sales calls. This kind of recognition demonstrates you recognize signs of leadership and may motivate team members to aspire to a career path within your company. You can track peer nominations quarterly or annually on a shared dashboard.
Many companies have peer appreciation programs with small tokens of appreciation awarded to those who support their colleagues. Set up an Airtable form to collect nominations, and then track their peer awards throughout the year to recognize those who realize there’s “No I in Team.”
The power of sales gamification
Sales contests are great motivators, and go beyond traditional sales commissions or bonuses that are usually paid monthly, quarterly, or annually. They also create friendly competition between your team and incentivize reps to increase their activity level and strive for customer satisfaction. I remember the excitement I felt when I was getting close to qualifying for a President’s Club trip.
Psychological benefits of sales contests include:
- A sense of accomplishment and recognition for the winning or top-performing reps
- Social connections between teammates can emerge from the competition.
- Reduced stress can result when work feels less like a grind and more like a competition.
- Increased focus and skill retention—Make tools like sales playbooks, competitive battlecards, or performance dashboards an integral part of the contest. If these resources help your sellers succeed in the contest, they’ll learn to make them part of their regular arsenal.
- Improved feelings of engagement and pride for continuously improving in many sales
- It can be challenging to shift motivation into a higher gear. Sales contests can remind your team what it’s like to perform at their peak and return to their winning ways.
Sales reps often admit they are “coin-operated,” meaning monetary rewards are high on their priority list. Others are more motivated by merchandise prizes, executive recognition, or experiences like travel or outings for their family.
Use dashboards for TV or desktop
A custom, real-time KPI dashboard can bring your sales contest to life by displaying competition metrics and rankings. By embedding the dashboard into the tools you use (such as Slack) or displaying it on a TV on the office wall, you will ensure that the contest is constantly top of mind.
This is also a great introduction to the power of performance dashboards in your everyday sales. Helping reps become more aware of their KPIs helps them focus on improving them.
With Geckoboard, you can build a KPI dashboard to support your contest in minutes. It integrates with Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, spreadsheets and over 90 different data sources.
Implementing gamification and competitions: Best practices
Before you start your next sales contest, make sure you:
- Have fair and transparent competition rules in place. Integrate your competition dashboard with trusted data sources like your SaaS CRM app to minimize any doubt that the results are authentic. It helps to keep dashboards updated with real-time data.
- Encouraging team participation and feedback. Don’t assume what motivates your team; ask them what incentives would drive them to increase their activity levels and focus on generating better outcomes.
I worked in business development for a company whose motto was Management by Measurement, which was integral to their business practices. Deciding on your team’s most important performance metrics and ensuring they are trending in the right direction is crucial to your company’s growth.
Ready to make sales team competitions part of your sales culture?
Helping your sales team compete in healthy ways within your company can help you identify your peak performers and those who need coaching or mentoring. Sales commissions and bonuses are a powerful performance motivator. Yet many sales professionals of all experience and skill levels need a boost of adrenaline now and then to keep their motivation and activity levels high.
Supercharge your sales team’s motivation and performance. Start planning a series of sales competitions to track and reward your sales team and make them feel valued and driven. For more information about Geckoboard sales competition dashboards, visit our dashboard examples page.
