Learning from 1,000,000 Sales People

Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, noted “Managers tend to pick a strategy that is the least likely to fail, rather then to pick a strategy that is most efficient.” Generations of sales managers have relied on personal knowledge of their people and their markets, gut feel and an irrational hope for good luck to impact every promotion they ran.

Today we have big data providing insights that were heretofore unimaginable. That’s where we are with GoalQuest, BIW’s patented incentive system. We just processed our 1,000,000th participant and we have gained some insights into sales incentives, goal setting and achievement, and motivation that are shaking up generations of myths and sales incentive legends.

Looking over data from 1,000,000 participants we see that do-this-get-that and stack-ranking incentive programs deliver poorer results than GoalQuest. We see that sales managers typically rely on the top 20% of their sales forces to drive the big numbers (and often fail) while GoalQuest engages nearly 100% of the sales force with more than 50% of all participants performing better than their baselines. In fact, the largest gainers in GoalQuest are the middle performers, not the top performers. And we’ve noticed that people who self-select their goals perform between 38% and 87% better than those who didn’t select their own goal.

GoalQuest is the most efficient incentive methodology we’ve ever seen. It’s easy to set up and easy to run. And it produces transparently measurable results. If you’re not using GoalQuest, you’re just missing out.