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Why do you need a Sales Contest Software?

10 minutes read

Want to increase your new product sales?

Want to meet a huge revenue target in a short period of time?

Want to fill your sales pipeline with more leads?

Do you want to close more deals before the end of the quarter?

All of these objectives can be achieved through a perfectly designed sales contest.


What is a Sales Contest?

A sales contest is a short-term incentive program designed to motivate your sales personnel to accomplish specific sales objectives.

To learn more about creating and running effective sales contests, refer to these blogs below:

KPI gamification part 1 - How to select KPIs

Sales Contest Part 1: The Secrets of Running a Successful Sales Contest

Sales Contest Part 2: How to design Sales Contest for a New Product Launch

Sales Contest Part 3: 9 Proven Sales Contests that Drive Productivity

A sales contest is a powerful tool that helps to drive extraordinary sales results. Most likely, you are using Microsoft Excel to run these calculations.


Challenges of an Excel-based Sales Contest

There are lots of challenges in running your contests through Excel:

  • Admins have to put a lot of effort and time doing tedious excel calculations for the contest. Sometimes, it takes up the entire effort of 1 person
  • It’s not possible to have multiple leaderboards that track progress in various areas in a contest. Because that makes the admin’s efforts all the more difficult
  • In a non-digitized contest, the contest’s progress is shared with the participants only once a week, or once a month. With no real-time updates on their progress in the contest, the participants tend to lose their interest and get disengaged easily.
  • Impossible to add complex scoring rules and track them

A simple and straightforward way to overcome these challenges is to digitize your sales contests.

A sales contest software tool helps you to run digitized sales contests.

Today, we are going to explore the reasons why you should adopt a sales contest software to run sales contests successfully:


Are you looking for a ready-made Sales Contest Template? Click here to design your own template for free, in just 3 clicks.


Reasons to Adopt a Sales Contest Software

1. Easy to hold competitions at various levels

A sales contest software enables you to conduct contests at various levels. Like,

  • Sales Rep vs Sales Rep - Contest at an individual level, between the individual sales reps

  • Team vs Team - Contest at a team level, between various sales teams

  • Manager vs Manager - Contest at a managerial level, between various managers and their teams

  • Team vs Manager - An internal team contest, between a manager and her team

  • Department vs Department/ Branch vs Branch - Contest at an organizational level, between various departments/ business units/ branches of your organization

  • Territory vs Territory - Contest at a global level, between larger sales teams that are located in various countries

The best part is that you will have the ability to run multiple contests at various levels simultaneously.

Why should you add different levels in a sales contest? Holding sales contests at various levels ensures that everyone participates. This is especially important for a team with more than 100 people. Everyone gets a fair opportunity to contribute and win. This significantly improves the participation levels, competitive spirit, and engagement.

Team-level and Individual-level Challenge Competitions in SmartWinnr


2. Allows the formation of groups and sub-groups

Sales contest software allows you to create groups for

  • Teams from various regions like USA, Latam, APAC, and more

  • Teams of various managers like Team Linda, Team John, Team Lisa

  • Teams created to participate in a specific theme-based contest. Like, for NFL you can have teams like NY Ninjas, Chicago Chimps, Dallas Stars, Miami Mavericks, etc

  • Groups of new hires and group of experience people

  • And any other group that you would like to create

It allows you to create subgroups as well. You can select some specific members from a group (eg: the top performers in the group) and create a sub-group for them.

Why should you add different groups to your sales contest? This makes it easy for you to assign or reassign a task. You can do so by directly selecting the group that already exists in the system.

Also, you can have group-wise leaderboards. Different leaderboards for different groups and sub-groups. This helps you to keep a track of the performance of each group separately.

Groups in the SmartWinnr App


3. Collaboration between teams and individuals

Sales contest software comes with a group chat feature that facilitates communication and collaboration between the members of a group/ sub-group.

A group participating in a team-based contest can use this group chat to:

  • Discuss strategies on how to move forward and win the contest

  • Encourage each other in the group to achieve their goals

  • Share achievements with their group members

  • And, congratulate the top performers in their group

Why should you encourage collaboration in your sales contest? Keeps the engagement high. Participants are excited, and they have a single place from where they communicate with each other. It facilitates team-work and peer-to-peer collaboration. It significantly improves their chances of winning in the contest.

Chat Group in the SmartWinnr App


4. Automates assignment of smaller and larger tasks

By adopting a sales contest software, you don’t have to manually create assignments and go through the process of assigning them to each individual separately. You can use a single platform to create any task and assign it automatically, multiple times.

For example, you may want to assign smaller tasks to your reps like,

  • A short quiz test

  • A video coaching assignment

  • A task to bring in a certain number of leads by the end of the day

Or you may want to assign larger assignments like,

  • Bringing in the largest deal of the quarter

  • Earning a certain amount of revenue within a period of 6 months etc

All these can be done automatically and easily within just a few clicks in a sales contest platform

Why is this important in a sales contest? For the game administrator, who is looking over a sales contest, this feature saves an ample amount of time and lets her focus on other crucial tasks.


5. Automatically Calculate Contest scores

Running a sales contest typically involves a lot of calculations. Like

  • Calculate points per KPI (Learn about KPI gamification)

  • Calculate the total team score

  • Calculate the total score of each individual

  • Calculate points based on levels. Consider the below example to understand how points are calculated based on levels:

    • Achieve 50% of your target - The rep earns 60 points

    • Achieve 50% to 70% of your target - The rep earns 80 points

    • Achieve 70% to 90% of your target - The rep earns 100 points

    • Achieve 90% to 95% of your target - The rep earns 120 points

    • Achieve 100%of your target - The rep earns 140 points

    • Achieve more than 100% of your target - The rep earns 200 points

Why is this important in a sales contest? Doing all these calculations in an excel sheet is a tedious and time-consuming task. But by having a sales contest software, you can automate all these calculations. While it takes days for you to manually do these complex calculations and come up with a final result, the system would do it in real-time.

It’s a time saver for the managers as it takes tedous work off their schedule. Also, you can be assured of accuracy in the calculations and results that are produced from a computerized system.

Automated Scoring Mechanism in SmartWinnr


6. Supports Multiple Leaderboards

With sales contest software, you will be able to establish multiple leaderboards and track progress in various areas. Here are some example leaderboards that you can establish and monitor.

  • Intra-country and inter-country leaderboards

  • Leaderboards for current month, or the first month

  • Leaderboards for new hires and experienced employees

  • General leaderboard, and more

Apart from this, you will also have the ability to create ad-hoc leaderboards.

Why do you need multiple leaderboards in your sales contest? Create multiple leaderboards when you have large teams. It gives every participant a chance to win the contest, in some form or the other. Moreover, when you have smaller teams within a large team, it helps participants to know who they’re competing with.

SmartWinnr's Team and Individual Leaderboards


7. Accessibility Across Various Devices

In a non-digitized sales contest, you might be sending progress updates through email, once a month. But this is not enough to keep their engagement high. You need to give them live updates about their rankings in the competition.

This is possible with sales contest software. It showcases a live leaderboard that can be accessed Through an app in the mobile devices and tablets And through a portal or web-based app in a computer system.

This kind of flexibility allows the contest participants and their managers to view the progress anytime and from anywhere they want. Even when they are on the field.

Why do you need to update participants regularly in a sales contest? You will be able to engage them more effectively in the contest. This also inspires them to try and improve themselves constantly and reach the top position on the leaderboard.

Access to Game's Progress Across various Devices


8. Easy to Send Contest Communication to the Participants

While the contest is in progress, it’s a good idea to send regular communication to the participants and their managers about the contest. For instance, you could send communication about:

  • Their ranking in the contest with respect to the other participants

  • Any last minute changes that you might have made to the contest format

  • Notify them about how far they are from achieving their target.

  • Encourage them to try harder and achieve the goal

  • Congratulate the ones who have achieved or exceeded their targets

You can easily send out this communication at various levels (participants and managers) along with the corresponding data using the sales contest software. Your communication gets delivered as a message, through the sales contest app, to the participants’ mobile devices. This way they will be able to receive the message immediately no matter where they are.

Why is this important in a sales contest? This feature helps you capture the participants’ attention, sparks their interest in the contest, and engages them effectively with the contest.

Sales Contest Communication through the SmartWinnr App


9. Easy Course Correction

While you leave no rock unturned in planning a fool-proof contest, there might be instances where you miss something or want to reiterate something.

For example,

  • One of your team members has entered the wrong sales data for a day

  • You have made a mistake with the points and you want to correct it

  • Or there might be occasions where you want one of your contest participants to retake a test and upload the new score again.

With the sales contest software, you can easily search for a particular incorrect data record and replace it with the correct one.

Why is this important in a sales contest? This assures you that even if something goes wrong during your contest, you can put it back on the right track without spending weeks on it.


10. Get Valuable Consultation

Another great advantage of using a sales contest software is the free consultation that comes with it. Most sales contest software vendors have the experience of running various kinds of contests for various businesses. So, they have the expertise in driving sales contests to success.

Apart from providing technical support for your sales contest software tool, they will also be able to:

  • Provide innovative ideas on enhancing your initiative

  • Tips to improve your employee engagement in the contest

  • Help you correct things if they go wrong

  • Consult on other aspects of driving a successful sales contest

Why is this important in a sales contest? Along with having the sales contest software tool, you will also have a dedicated team of consultants who can help you improve your contest strategy.

Note: Being in the sales contest software business and having consulted many businesses to date, we assure you that you will surely end up with some really innovative ideas to enhance your sales contests from these experts


SmartWinnr: The ultimate software for all your sales contest needs

Introducing SmartWinnr’s Sales Contests. An AI-powered gamification platform that takes your sales team’s productivity to the next level and boosts your sales by 80%.

Run the most effective, engaging, hustle-free, and automated sales contests through the SmartWinnr platform. Exciting contest themes, live leaderboards, easy to use mobile app for sales reps and managers, and many more.

Curious to see it in action? Book a demo with us today!

Published on Tue Nov 3 2020

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