We often believe incentives will change behavior. The reality is that incentives won’t work unless the person first believes in what they are doing and has the confidence and skills to produce the desired results.

Owners and managers often ask me how to incentivize their comfort advisers or service technicians to sell more. I tell them that they can’t do it with incentives alone.

We know that incentives produce results with some people, so how can you use incentives to work with everyone? Begin by reframing the concept of incentives to offering rewards. An incentive is something that is intended to create a desired behavior, such as sell more, with the presumption that the person is not already selling as much or as well as they could. But if the person isn’t selling up to their potential, then that’s an issue of motivation and is more effectively addressed as a performancemanagement issue. In fact, offering incentives to someone who is being lazy is actually teaching them to wait for you to offer them more money to do their job!

It’s much better to have a comfort adviser or service technician who believes that selling is providing a noble service to customers and enjoys helping customers get the benefits from new products and services. When they do that well, they get a reward in the form of a commission. If sales are slow due to various circumstances — such as our current economic environment — and you need above-normal effort to produce additional sales results, then offering additional reward can be the spark that gets the properly motivated person to get those results.

I talked with a comfort adviser last night about this. He is having a very good month but is just one average sale short of hitting a monthly bonus target. Hitting that target is worth $2,700 to him, and he was turning over every rock and pebble to find the sale to get him there. Would he be making all this effort if that reward weren’t out there? Probably not. What has to be recognized is that he was motivated to work hard all month, not just on the last day, and the reward is worth the additional effort he’s now making.

You might be thinking that the simple solution is to hire people who are already motivated, and of course you’d be correct. Finding them is another matter. You can hire someone who sells lots of jobs with high pressure tactics that tend to offend people. Your business depends on longterm customer relationships, and you can’t afford to irritate loyal customers. On the other hand, you can hire someone who is good with customers but doesn’t have good selling and closing skills. But you can’t afford that either. You need someone who can soft-sell with high skill. With the right person, the right training, the right management, the right coaching and the right rewards for performance, you can consistently create extraordinary sales results.

The Right Person

How can you know for sure a person will be effective at sales? You don’t.

But you can “screen” for this somewhat with certain questions. For example, ask sales candidates about the last time they made a top-of line purchase. Probe them for details on what went into the decision to purchase and how the purchasing experience went. From this you probably will be able to tell how comfortable candidates would be selling high end items, i.e., if candidates don’t like to buy high-end items or take a long time to decide on a high-end purchases, then they’ll expect the same from customers.

The Right Training

Let’s say that you have a sales person or service technician who knows hvacr and is a good, loyal team member, but his sales are below par.

There are many good hvacr sales trainers. Sales people thrive on continuous training. They always learn something that immediately increases sales. Always.

The Right Management

I rarely see an owner or manager in my seminars. They send their sales person or technician to learn how to sell better, and they do; but they use one or two sales tools or tactics, and leave 20 untouched. What a waste. It’s vital to a company’s long-term success to create and manage a sales process. Sales people come and go. The company must keep sales people on track using required sales tools, following pricing requirements, following up with all leads, and much more. If the process isn’t managed, it won’t get done. Period.

The Right Coaching

If you’re not going to coach, then don’t spend the money to train. Coaching includes meeting with sales people to discuss jobs, riding along to observe performance, giving performance feedback, role-playing in sales meetings, and recognizing outstanding performance. Most owners and managers don’t coach, and tens of thousands in sales are left on the table as a consequence.

The Right Rewards for Performance

I favor a tiered commission plan that pays a base commission on monthly sales up to a monthly goal and then pays a bonus commission on all monthly sales when the monthly goal is exceeded. Other rewards that can be offered include:

• Bonus for self-generated sales.
• Quarterly bonus on top of commissions when quarterly goals are met.
• Annual bonus for exceeding the yearly goal.
• Monthly contests for non-monetary prizes. (Maybe that new 56-inch, big-screen television.)
• Team contests where everyone wins. For example, the company sells 30 hybrid systems, and all sales people and significant others go on a firstclass dinner cruise.

Sales incentives can work well, and they can help create an exciting, positive work environment for everyone. Just make sure that you are positioning this as a reward for the behavior you want and not just feeding someone’s greed.

Good selling!

Tom Piscitelli has more than 30 years of experience in HVAC sales, sales management, marketing and consulting. He has worked with contractors, distributors, manufacturers, builders and utilities. He is the president of T.R.U.S.T.® Training and Consulting. To contact Tom or order his DVD, CD or workbook go to www.sellingtrust.com or 425-985-4534