If you achieve your sales goal, you will win a trip to Hawaii. If you don’t achieve your goal, you and your entire team will travel to Fargo, North Dakota in December. Sounds motivating, right? Sounds like sales will increase, right?
In my opinion, it is neither motivating nor a sure fire way to increase sales. Take a look at the link at the bottom of this post regarding the sales team that failed to achieve their goal and did wind up in Fargo.
Sure it’s not Hawaii, but as a team they’re were still hanging out together not having to do their job. Call me old school, but forget it — this doesn’t fly in my book. You miss your numbers, you lose. Period. The reason I don’t like this is the team was still able to hang out together, bond as a team and talk about what they would be doing if they were in Hawaii. The fact remains that they were getting time to simply screw around.
Now if I’m in marketing for the company, I love the idea because of all the free publicity the company is getting because of the novelty of the whole thing. If I’m in marketing, I love it; if I’m in sales, I hate it. The piece that really got me is the sales team has been told that if they don’t make next year’s goals, they’ll be traveling to Rapid City, South Dakota.
Call me harsh but the person they should have meeting them in Rapid City should be the HR department manager with their exit packages.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2013679915_alohafargo15.html
Copyright 2010, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog.
