How CRM and sales incentives are closely intertwined

Rewards and recognition programs are well known to benefit all sorts of businesses, in all sorts of ways. According to the Society for Human Resources Management, an effective rewards and recognition program can positively influence employee experience and engagement, as well as the overall organisational culture.

When these elements of a business are all in check, that excellent culture is often passed on to your customers, improving their experiences and strengthening your valuable relationships.

Given all this, it stands to reason that you might consider implementing incentive and recognition programs within your sales team to drive performance and improve customer outcomes. In this article, we’ll examine how incentives and recognition help to boost your sales and why a CRM like Rhino is the perfect tool to underpin your program.

How incentives and recognition boost sales performance

First of all, let’s explain the difference between incentives and recognition. Incentives are rewards directly tied to measurable targets, providing employees with a sense of personal accomplishment when they earn the incentive award. This could be monetary or another reward, like additional paid time off.

Meanwhile, employee recognition is more about acknowledging the professional accomplishments of your staff. It’s a more emotional lever that’s directly related to an individual’s achievements – whether that’s improvement in quarterly sales numbers or a particularly significant upsell.

While similar, these are two different aspects of employee motivation that can both be leveraged with the help of a CRM system. In fact, a CRM has a symbiotic relationship with recognition and incentives.

When introducing a CRM to your business, it’s not uncommon to experience some pushback or teething issues as your team get used to adopting new processes. This is alleviated in part by choosing an easy-to-use CRM system like Rhino. However you can further reduce the strain of change by rewarding the use of your CRM with incentives and recognition.

Using the back-end of your CRM system, you can see how staff are engaging with it – such as if they’re regularly updating it and planning in advance, or only entering minimal data at the end of the week. With this insight, you can exemplify and reward positive attitudes and CRM uptake. You might also use incentives to tap into most sales peoples’ innate competitive nature. Offer a small reward to the sales person who most regularly engages with the CRM and see who bites.

How a CRM system enables smarter rewards and incentives programs

Many of our customers say to their sales team, “if it’s not in Rhino, it didn’t happen”. This is because the point of a CRM system is to provide whole-of-business transparency. When reps are regularly entering sales activity, your organisational leaders can see what’s going on and more accurately forecast for the business.

For sales team leaders, this means you can directly see how sales staff are performing. With total transparency to a sales rep’s individual performance, it becomes much easier to offer recognition where recognition is due.

Likewise, incentives can be much more easily awarded as custom key performance indicators and targets can easily be set up and instantly tracked with every entry to the CRM system. Rhino has the added benefit of allowing sales people to save photos alongside call cards in the system, validating their activities and supporting KPIs.

Revolutionise your sales with Rhino CRM

It’s time to let go of unreliable spreadsheets and introduce your business to automated intelligence and robust performance tracking. Using Rhino by Forte IS, you can empower your sales team to capture each piece of sales activity and ensure no positive action goes unnoticed. The more your team engages with Rhino, the better you can reward and reinforce excellent employee behaviour.

For more information about Rhino, reach out to Forte IS today.