How do you motivate sales reps in the wood flooring industry? Wood Floor Business recently published some of our specific tactics designed to get the most out of a wood floor sales employee incentive program. Incentive Solutions CEO Steve Damerow recommends these five strategies for maximizing the effectiveness of sales employee incentives:
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Use non-cash rewards.
In order to motivate flooring sales reps to go above and beyond their average performance, you have to offer a reward that’s above average. One of the best ways to do this is to offer online reward points that can be redeemed in a digital catalog. Reward points are different from salary or commission, therefore they motivate sales teams and contractors to do things money can’t.
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Offer a mobile-friendly sales employee incentive program.
Sales employee incentive programs can and should fold conveniently into the busy, smartphone-centric lives of today’s on-the-go flooring sales reps. Sales incentive mobile apps allow participants to receive program updates, alerts, sales promotion information on the spot, or upload invoices, warranty registrations and other sales claims documentation from the field.
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Use incentives with your sales promotions.
When it’s time to give some special attention to a specific flooring product—maybe one that’s newly designed or environmentally friendly—incentives can help you increase sales of these products. Offer sales reps exclusive, limited-time reward points bonuses for selling these products.
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Distribute sales rewards for adding value to the average sale.
Reward sales reps for upselling products or adding supplemental products, like cleaning supplies or wood vents, onto a sale. This reinforces behavior that increases the value of an average sale and could even normalize such actions. Eventually, “upselling” and “adding” may no longer be extra effort for your sales reps, but ingrained into standard sales performance.
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Encourage product knowledge with training incentives.
Time is a resource none of us have enough of. Unfortunately, that means sales reps are rarely committing to enough ongoing training. An online, mobile-ready sales employee incentive program can make training both faster and more appealing. Sales reps can earn reward points for passing product knowledge quizzes or daily trivia questions on their phones. Not only will they better understand the benefits of bamboo flooring or the environmental risk factors of solid wood, their training incentive rewards help them save up for that new grill they’re dying to redeem their points for!