Salesincentive northwestmissourian

Derby Days

Sales Incentive Program

Northwest Missouri State University

Derby Days

The Race: The 2012-2013 school year was a very memorable year for our sales team. It was the year that all 4 media, newspaper, radio, television, and yearbook, at Northwest Missouri State University merged to become Northwest Student Media. This merger meant that are sales staff would now be challenged to sell advertising for all four media.

At the end of the 2012-2013 school year our advertising team sat down to review the products we sold and to see if each one made enough profit to continue selling that product. We discovered was that although we had merged we focused a lot on what we were comfortable with and sold mostly newspaper ads.

Our meeting inspired us to create an incentive program that would make our sales team not only focus on newspaper but all of the media we were expected to sell. After much thought and watching the Kentucky Derby, we came up with Derby Days.

Derby Days is an incentive program that encouraged our sales team to not only sell newspaper but radio, television, and yearbook advertisements as well. We created a horse race track and made each one of our sales representatives a jockey. The representatives horse moved forward on the track based on the amount of money they sold. At the end of the semester the sales representative closest to the finish line received a gift card to a restaurant of their choice.

Since horse racing is a rich mans sport we also incorporated money into our game.

This portion of the incentive program was done on a monthly basis. Each item sold was worth a certain amount of money. The items that needed to increase revenue were worth more money then the items that we were already efficient in. This encouraged our sales representatives to sell a variety of items and not the products they were most comfortable with. The representative with the most money at the end of the month received a prize of their choice from our University Bookstore or a baked good of their choice from our advisor.

This incentive program has helped us to increase the amount of advertisers on the on radio by 37% and the amount of newspaper revenue by 13%.

Derby Days

The race track above represents the amount of money each representative brought in. Â

Each sales representative and their horse Â

A picture of our advisor was included at the finish line. Â

Derby Days

The money handed out to the sales representatives was designed with the faces of our Northwest Student Media Advisors, University mascot and the campus pest the squirrel. Â

Derby Days

This poster hung in the office to remind sales representatives of the contest and how much money they would receive for the product they sold. Â