Case Study: How to Motivate Your Sales Team and Get Its Commitment
Sales executives often face challenging goals and it takes a lot of effort to keep them motivated.
When it comes to presenting the revenue plan for the new year, which is even more ambitious than
the previous one, the management always searches for the best ways to communicate new goals.
It is extremely important to ensure that everybody is aligned with the goals and believes in fulfilling
them.
This was the mission of one of our clients, Heineken, as well. Michal Chudík, the National Sales
Manager, put himself in a challenging position – how to present the new plan in a way that would
get the sales representatives to answer “Yes” to his final question: “Can we make it?”
It was a high-stakes presentation, and he put a lot of effort into it. If he wanted to succeed, he had to
re-think the whole setup and the way of delivering his message.
National Sales Day 2017
National Sales Day took place at the end of January 2017. It was a one-day offsite event where the
sales team reviewed the achievements of 2016 and presented the strategy for the new-year. Around
200 internal employees took part, including the board of directors and marketing and sales teams.
The tech solution
Strategic sales presentations are often stats heavy. Michal as interaction advocate wanted to
transform traditional one-way talks and energize the participants in the course of the day: “I wanted
to increase the level of interaction with the audience by boosting the engagement index of every
single team member to the highest possible one.”
In order to achieve that, he decided to use Slido for Q&A as well as for live polling.
Meeting design
Entertaining warm-up poll
Before kicking-off the sessions, Michal introduced Slido onstage and prepared a warm-up poll to
make participants familiar with the tool. He started in a very serious tone:
“The question I am about to ask you is critical for the future direction of our business. We’ve been
struggling with this issue for 3 years now and I hope that you can help us settle this once and for all.”
Standing there with another team leader and an unsuspecting audience in front of them, he
activated a poll:
“Who is more handsome?”
People burst into laughter. Even with a majority of men in the audience, this bold question helped
relax the atmosphere in the room before diving deeper into numbers and revenue strategies.
Questions without correct answers
The whole afternoon was then devoted to the presentations of the last year’s results and new plans.
When presenting numbers, the speakers came up with a smart idea on how to get participants
interested.
Instead of putting the correct answer to “What was our market share at [brand] retail chain in
2016?” into one of the options of a poll, they created fake options that were smaller than the actual
number.
Using the moment of surprise to reveal the real number to the delegates served as a collective
recognition and had a positive impact on their learning.
National champion analogy
When evaluating the results from 2016 earlier that day, Michal showed a video of Slovak cycling
champion Peter Sagan and his success as an example. When closing his presentation at the end of
the day, he referred to the same framework.
“After a year full of hard work,” Michal said, “Sagan achieved great success. We have all the means
to succeed as well.” He followed with a quick summary of all the innovations and improvements that
had been presented for the new year’s strategy.
Finally, he activated a live poll and said: “Peter Sagan made it. Can we make it, too?”
The final answer
An incredible 97% of the audience voted “YES.” Expressing that they are ready to work hard to meet
the presented numbers was a huge satisfaction for the whole team. The atmosphere in the room
was so charged that the remaining 3% of the attendees would have been jeered at if it wasn’t for the
anonymity of the votes.
Michal noted: “I felt a massive energy from the crowd and the level of engagement boosted the
confidence of the whole organization! The whole setup turned out to be the most unique thing we
could do in order to receive what we wanted.”
The only thing left to do was to close the event with sincere acknowledgment of the team’s
determination and move to its unofficial part.
The result
The response from the sales representatives was truly rewarding.
“Standing in front of the audience heading to the very last question ‘Can we make it?’ made me
realize that the level of engagement and energy I felt from the audience was the most unique
moment worth the bet we put behind the whole setup. I had a feeling that they were fully engaged
with the company targets being the most challenging ever.”
Question for discussion: How to replicate this at your event? How would you get the commitment
from your team and wrap up the session on a high note.
