Ah, reward. Sweet, sweet reward.

Hold up.

Before reward, there must be defined goals. No matter if you’re a sales manager or a marketing manager, your team needs to function completely off of a clear set of goals that measure performance, efficiency, or impact.

Setting Goals and Rewarding Performance in Sales

Sales people are used to goals and performance based incentives. Being mostly commission-based, sales people are inherently programmed to digest goals, work to achieve them, and reap the rewards.

As a sales manager, your role lies in setting those goals, motivating performance, and creating a powerful reward structure.

Setting Goals

• Tier your sales goals
  • Make one attainable goal that each member of your team should meet
  • Create 2-3 other tiers that are progressively harder with increased rewards
• Create team-based competition
  • Though individual performance is key, managers need to create an environment where the best team members will take the time to nurture the stragglers
  • Divide your sales staff into multiple teams, balancing ability and experience. This will foster intra-team camaraderie while still encouraging inter-team competition.

Motivating Performance

• Provide your team with the training and tools they need to succeed
  • Empowering your team with the right software is key. So key, in fact, that we even dedicated our entire next section to it.
  • Give your team constant constructive feedback. If they’re doing a great job, awesome! Tell them. If they’re doing things wrong, it’s better to be up-front about it. Just remember to always be constructive.
• Create an environment that pushes everyone to do their best
  • Don’t be afraid to spend for your sales team. The right environment can make all the difference. Paint the room the company colors, put up some TVs with sales leaderboards, and give them the best coffee. But, remember – coffee is for closers (thanks, Alec)
  • Spend the up-front time developing a system that will enable all your employees to succeed. Success stories will become your greatest motivational asset.

Rewarding Results

• Show me the money
  • This one doesn’t need much explaining. Sales teams run on commission. Don’t skimp on your commissions. They’re going to ensure your sales staff has the same goals as you.
  • Heavily incentivize break points at the next goal tier. For example, if your second tier starts at 20 units, make sure that you reward 20 units much more than 19. Common ways of doing this include a cash bonus or back-dated commission.
• Reward teams with things that will bring them closer together (then consider switching the teams)
  • Team-based rewards shouldn’t be another cash prize. Reward winning teams with constructive experiences – these can be as small as a round of golf or as grand as a group trip across the country.
  • Consider switching the teams afterwards. Switching up the teams can help create new friendships and eventually will help unify your entire team. That being said, there’s no need to break up a dream team if one exists.

Setting Goals and Rewarding Performance in Marketing

Marketing teams deal with complex problems on a regular basis. Whether an underperforming ad campaign, a overly-demanding sales team, or a frustrating glitch in code, marketers can become easily discouraged.

As a marketing manager, you need to make sure your employees stay on track to get their work done, while also producing at the highest possible quality. This involves setting deadlines, encouraging creativity, and rewarding high quality work.

Setting Deadlines

• Create Unanimously. Revise Frequently.
  • Though deadlines are important, it’s critical that you be mindful of your audience. As creative professionals, marketers need some flexibility with their deadlines or else they may feel insurmountable. It’s always smart to make sure your whole team is on board with each deadline – they can even set their own deadlines.
  • Don’t be afraid to revise deadlines where possible. Priorities change, projects increase in scope or complexity, and issues emerge. As these issues unfold, revise your deadlines while still being aggressive. You can also pivot your deadline strategy and roll out deadlines in stages.
• Clearly communicate deadlines as they approach and stay involved
  • Keep your team on track by maintaining open lines of communication. Always be available for your team, especially as deadlines approach.
  • Stay on top of your team’s deadlines and check in with your team frequently. In a perfect world, your team would stay on top of their deadlines, but that doesn’t always happen. You need to be the one who constantly reinforces the urgency of the deadlines.

Encouraging Creativity

• Challenge your employees and encourage them to go above-and-beyond
  • If you’ve hired correctly, each member on your team should be desperate to learn and prove themselves. Challenging your employees with larger assignments is a great way to foster their desire to learn while also allowing them to demonstrate their creativity or problem solving skills.
  • These days, good marketing goes unnoticed. To stand out, your team needs to produce incredible work. If your team is not producing as well as it should, start with one part of your team that you think has the most potential. Focus all your effort and that group to start producing exceptional work. Once the rest of your team sees the incredible work that your group is producing, they’ll want to follow suit.
• Work on fun stuff
  • Some projects will suck. That’s life. But most projects should be fun for your team. No matter what industry you’re in, try to spin your projects in a positive light. Show your employees the over-arching goal and give them the flexibility to tackle each project their own way.
  • Pursue a passion project quarterly or semi-annually. Passion projects should still be productive, but should be something that’s super fun for your team to work on and is something they want to show all their friends. Here’s an awesome one from one of our beta testers, Total Mortgage.

Rewarding High Quality Work

• Incentivize quality over timeliness
  • Though adherence to deadlines is incredibly important, the single most valuable asset to your team will be a consistently high quality of work. Great work (and the desire to create great work) is infectious, especially among ego-driven marketers.
  • With each great piece of “art” that your team produces, reward them and challenge them to create something even better next time.
• Reward the whole team when objectives are met
  • Since marketing is so cross-functional, it’s often unfair to reward individually. Though there may be times when individual rewarding is beneficial, most of your reward budget should be focused on the team as a whole.
  • Options for rewarding can include cash bonuses, free lunches, time off, or even additional work flexibility.