Someone once told me that a good indicator of competitiveness is how someone answers the question, "What creates a more intense emotion – when you win, or when you lose?" The most competitive people will tell you that losing is a deeper, more emotional feeling than when they win. They want to win so badly that losing just makes them depressed, dejected, and flat out angry. Winning is rewarding, but also expected.

This blog summarizes our white paper: Does CRM Adoption Really Matter? 9 Proven Ways to Improve CRM Adoption and Drive Revenues—Without Driving Salespeople Crazy.

When designing sales contests, sales managers often struggle with the following question...

Choosing the right sales incentives to motivate a team can be challenging. On the one hand, they need to be exciting enough to motivate a sales force to change their behavior, or at least point it in a certain direction. On the other hand, they also need to fit within an organization's budget and not cost so much that they cancel out the benefit of holding a sales contest in the first place. Incentives can come in a number of different flavors, all of which can be effective.

We just finished up our sponsorship of the Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco, which was a great event. There were a couple hundred people in attendance, and I heard very positive feedback from the attendees. Having been at a few of these events, I thought this one had particularly good content and speakers. Most everyone I spoke with had specific ideas to put in action when they get back to the office.

To drive sales performance, sales managers must carefully craft a team of sales people who can rise to meet the goals for the business.  Sales incentive programs play a pivotal role in the achievement of these goals.  The challenge is how to choreograph sales incentive programs that will produce the right types of behavior.  Sales people react differently to various forms of incentives and are motivated in various ways. To pull off an award winning performance, sales managers should produce sales incentive programs that work in harmony with both long term and short term needs of the business.

ePrize has been an exciting growth story, especially here in Detroit. We started in 1999 by moving the consumer promotion world to digital. Thirteen years later, we manage 400% more national chance-to-win programs than any other firm in the industry, have over 365 people in five offices, recently completed two acquisitions, and see nothing but upside. 13 years later it still feels like we're just getting started.

Sales managers get pulled in many different directions, and it's critical that you're focused on the right things to motivate sales. This infographic summarizes some insights on maximizing performance within your own sales organization.

We are working on a whitepaper adoption of sales CRM systems (Salesforce.com, Oracle, Microsoft CRM, etc.) and would appreciate your insights! Please respond to the poll below based on your own sales organization.