I have a lot of experience with sales contests, both running them, and participating in them.

Personally, I love sales contests, and I think they’re a fantastic way to sharpen the focus on promoting a brand.

They’re also educational.

Running a sales promotion shows you who amongst the participants are driven by incentives to work even harder and try to win.

It’s applicable not only to internal contests for a single sales team, I’ve also seen it in vendor-sponsored sales contests aimed at the dealer network.

In one particular vendor-sponsored contest, when the final results were tallied, the dealers in contention to win had all posting MASSIVE increases over the prior year’s period.

That was to be expected as, of course, that’s the whole point of having a contest in the first place.

More surprising was the contest results from the dealers at the bottom of the contest.

The lowest performers in the contest posted no sales growth at all. Some even did worse.

You’d never know from their results that they were even participating in a contest at all.

This ties in to what I’ve come to understand about motivation.

You can’t “motivate” anyone.

Motivation comes from within. Someone either wants something or the don’t. No amount of external motivation will get people to take themselves to the next level if their intrinsic motivation is absent.

Think of it as another application of the 80/20 rule: 80% of your sales growth is going to come from the top 20%.

Once you’ve identified your top 20%, maybe focus your sales contests on them.