How To Spiff Your Team and Get Results Without Spending A Lot Of Money
Spiffs have been around for a long, long time to incentisize sales teams to go above and beyond their norm. Spiffs were first given out to Drapers in order to sell old stock in London back in the late 1800's. The first known article about spiffs was written in the Pall Mall Gazette (a famous newspaper from London, England). If you can find a copy of this article it is from the Wednesday, April 2nd,1890 edition. The article is called The Ladies Corner: Round the Clock with a London Draper.
The most popular way of spiffing sales is by putting a monetary value on a certain product or sales goal. What I propose we do is something slightly different. Instead of rewarding salespeople with a quick monetary gain through spiffs we reward them by offering them the opportunity to use that money towards building their personal brands. This would require your sales people to want to grow and increase their business in order to work.
Self branding and personal brands have never been more important than they are in this day and age. How is a salesperson supposed to stand out from the competition if they don't have their own brand? The answer is they can't and they won't. If your team is not building themselves their own brand then they are most likely relying strictly on the dealership to provide traffic. Successful dealerships know and understand that we can no longer strictly rely on foot traffic if we want to dominate the market place. We need salespeople who want to build their own clientelle and cater to them.
So how does this work as a spiff many of you are asking. It's very simple. Offer your sales team money towards building their brand and marketing themselves. I have talked to hundreds of salespeople and the number 1 reason is that they don't want to spend their own money on branding themselves. They have not been taught the benefits or trained on how to brand themselves. Their is no excitement to them because they have never seen the benefits of self marketing and branding. In order to get them excited dealers will have to train their sales staff (or have professionals come in and train them) on these benefits. Many dealers probably don't know the benefits behind self branding and self marketing either so in the comments please help me get the word out to these dealers!
My ideal spiff would be one where salespeople put their own money towards their marketing and the dealer matches it to a certain amount. I have found salespeople market and brand themselves a bit smarter if they are investing in themselves as well. So have your spiff work something like this: reach a certain amount of vehicles and dealer will match the salesperson's contribution (to a certain amount.) Let's say the salesperson puts in $250 of their own money and at 10 vehicles the dealership matches it to a maximum of $500. In this example the dealership will only match the $250 because that's what the salesperson put it. This now gives the salesperson $500 towards Facebook ads, pens, increased referral money, etc. Tier the rewards so if a salesperson reaches the next level (lets say 15 vehicles here) the dealership triples what the salesperson put in (up to $1,000). In our example the salesperson would now have $750 to spend on marketing themselves. Hat tricks can be $100 towards the salespersons marketing account.
Why this will work? Once the sales team learns the benefits of marketing and branding themselves they will notice an increase in customers coming in and asking for them. The ones who don't want to invest in themselves will watch as those who are investing in themselves are selling more and making more money. This will hopefully engage those "laggers" to join the others in creating their own traffic as well. All in all, by investing in your team this way through your spiffs you will be teaching them how to build and create their own traffic and business, increasing your dealerships sales and gross in the process.
I would love to hear your thoughts, postive or negative in the comments below. If you would like to learn more about self branding and marketing leave a comment or DM me.