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In this stage we delve into contextual rules, controls and conditions, and explain how to apply them to the Sales Game. You’ll learn how to set up the rules of the game so that the game works and people are motivated to play. We’ll also give you practical examples of how we’ve set out the rules of the game for the salespeople that we’ve worked with. Finally, we go through the ‘rules for making rules’, which can serve as your checklist in designing your sales game.

Created at the company level, values are a set of overarching rules that set the context and the boundaries. Typically, values outline “how things are done around here’ and are expressed in the collective behaviours of your company. If the people in your company are aligned to a set of widely agreed overarching values and these values are reflected in their actual behaviours, then you achieve synergy. If the behaviours are misaligned to the values, or there are conflicting values across the company, then you get anarchy.

In their classic Good To Great, Jim Collins and Jerry Poras explain that your core values are a small set of timeless guiding principles that require no external justification; they have intrinsic value and importance to those inside the company, and are largely independent of the current environment, competitive requirements, or management fads.

Collins and Porras suggest that you should limit your core values to five or less. If you have more than five then you’re probably confusing core values (which do not change) with business strategies or management fads (which change like the wind). With values, it’s the meaning behind the words that matters. Value statements that are laced with clever marketing slogans, buzz words and hype will lose their authenticity.

One last point on values – they need to be lived. Many organisations have developed well-articulated value statements, but their reality – as reflected in the collective behaviours of the company – is light years away from their intention. This often comes down to poor communication, no reinforcement and hypocrisy. Bringing your values to life requires senior executives, business leaders and sales managers to lead from the front and be the example that they want their team to follow.

Created at the role level, expectations help you to control how the game is played. Expectations are the specific do’s and don’ts’ of the players role and are extremely powerful in influencing performance. If the players know what’s expected of them, everyone is on the same page and you achieve common understanding. When expectations are not clear, people work on assumptions, which can cause massive performance gaps if the wrong assumptions are made (which is often the case).

Customer satisfaction is often defined as ‘the degree to which you meet or exceed your customer expectations’. Meet or exceed your customer’s expectations and they will be satisfied or delighted, buy more often, and spread the word. Fail to meet their expectations and customers will be dissatisfied, probably never come back and have a good moan to their friends about their experience.

The same applies with your team. If your employees are aligned to the purpose and values of the company, and they want to do a good job by you, they will want to live up to your expectations (so that you are satisfied or delighted) you’re really clear about what you expect from your people and they agree that your expectations are reasonable, the expectations control the game.

One of the first things you should do as a Leader is to have a ‘Meeting of Expectations’. In the meeting, go over the values and set the boundaries for the game you are playing. Articulate the expectations you have of them and what they expect from you.

Over the years, we have come across as many different incentive schemes as there are sales roles. Some of them are so elaborate that you need to have an advanced degree in mathematics to work out how much commission the sales person will make. So without debating the merits or otherwise, the pertinent question is whether incentive schemes are worthwhile in the first place, and get you to rethink how you apply the to your people.

A lot of incentive schemes miss the mark. They try and influence performance and behavior by using one variable: money. People are far more complex and sophisticated than that. To believe that you can drive performance and motivation by using a one-dimensional approach, such as paying them more money, is like trying to get kids to behave by bribing them with chocolate.

Bribing kids with chocolate only works if you have the right fundamentals in place. If you are missing the core fundamentals, your attempts are going to backfire. You’ll end up having to bribe your kids with more and more chocolate to get them to behave the way you want them to. If your kids are smart, they will use your attempts to manipulate them with chocolate against you, and the only way to get them to do something will be to pay them off with more chocolate.

Dan Pink highlights this idea perfectly in his book Drive. By dispelling the myths of what motivates sales people at work, Dan reveals that the carrot and stick approach to motivation doesn’t work. Further, once people earn enough money to live comfortably, money doesn’t motivate. He suggests that what really drives people to perform is purpose (i.e. their work contributes to something bigger than themselves), mastery (i.e. they are growing themselves personally and professionally in their roles) and autonomy (i.e. they can make their own decisions and choices about how they do their work).

In the sales game, incentives are only going to work if you have created a game that people want to play and want to win. As we have explored, great games are inherently motivated. That is, people want to play for the love of the game itself. If we set up the game effectively in the first place, we’ll have to rely less on extrinsic motivators like money or chocolate to influence performance and behavior.