Successful Sales Promotion Planning: 15 Powerful Steps for Sales Managers!

Every year, millions of dollars are wasted on worthless sales promotions and incentives. When you offer incentives and promotions to sales reps, their results should skyrocket to sensational levels! For your promotion to be the best it can be, you need to do a good job of advanced planning.

Here's a checklist of fifteen things to consider when planning a powerful promotion. This checklist is proven to help you execute a promotion that produces significant sales gains.

1. Challenging, Achievable Goals: What will you achieve? Set your sights above your budget number or current results. With promotions you are creating "stretch goals." Makes sure you set team and individual goals. Include the reps in the goal setting, and track results daily during the promotion.


2. Timeframe: Set a time frame ripe for your situation. To make a point, focus on a week. To make a dramatic impact go for a month or quarter. Shorter promotions for a week or so can encourage a huge burst of energy and results. Longer promotions will generate more potential sales. Longer promos also can become boring and sales reps with fewer results will lose interest.


3. Sales Rep and Manager Incentives: What are the financial awards and standards for achievement? Remember, give everyone a chance to win and then recognize the top 2-3 reps with an award of excellence. Also, include team incentives for the managers.


4. One-on-One Coaching: Conduct one-on-one coaching more often. Start phone-coaching calls. How can you improve your coaching skills?


5. Field Coaching: To increase your results, you need to be in the field more often. What is your plan? How can you help the poor performers? How will you challenge the better performers?


6. Sales Training: Conduct supportive sales or product training. Where does your team need to improve the most? Who will facilitate the training? Ensure it is engaging and relevant.


7. Kickoff Meeting: Plan a special kickoff meeting. Include sales and product training, promotional details, competition and a motivational talk. Use an off-site location and include refreshments.


8. Product: Do you have enough inventory or samples? Who is responsible? How can you get everything ahead of time?


9. Awards: Electronics are hot awards, today. The IRS frowns on cash, so gift cards are often used. The shorter the timeframe for the promotion the less expensive the awards; the longer the timeframe the more expensive the payoff.


10. Marketing Engage marketing for advertising, ideas and literature. Do you have the flyers you need? How will you distribute them?


11. Positive-Plus Environment: How can you decorate and enhance your work environment to make the promo special and exciting? Or, how about some out-of-the-box thinking? One manager promised that the winning team could throw a pie in her face at the next sales conference.


12. Profiling Sales Reps: Which sales reps need the most help? How will you help them? How can you challenge your best performers? How about the others?


13. Targeted Accounts: What special considerations can you make for your key customers or targeted prospects? How will you make this a team effort?


14. Support Tools: What reports can you use to focus the attention of the sales reps and managers? Will you provide slogan-branded t-shirts to everyone? What else do you need?


15. Other: What have you learned from your most successful promotions? What have the lower performing promotions taught you? What else can you do to hit a home run? How can you start fast so that customers and sales reps alike are ready to roll when the promotion begins? Once the promotion is done, how will you pay-off the results?

These considerations will help you plan a successful sales promotion. Remember, the goal is to significantly increase sales and set a higher standard of excellence for your sales team. There is a lot to consider, yet, if you want your team to be better you have to be better as a sales leader.

By Rick A Conlow  

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