Effective Strategies to Prevent Cheating in Sales Contests

Sales contests are great to boost sales productivity but can be counterproductive when sales reps cheat. Cheaters win all the time, and the most honest sales reps withdraw from contests. In the end, cheating brings dissension among sales reps and your company is giving money away. How to avoid it?

Make it public

Sales Operations is usually the contest quality checker. I organized one contest a week for about a year and found out that one way to avoid cheating it to make it public. Most of the time, I organized contests about sales activities like calls and meetings booked, and always displayed Salesforce dashboards on a TV screen so anyone can check it.

I installed the Google Chrome Extension “Enhance Salesforce Dashboard” so the dashboard auto-refreshed every 5 minutes. Sales reps will bust cheaters who logged three meetings during the last 10 minutes, and that’s why making it public is efficient.

Get the right tools

The first thing you should do it making the contest rules as clear as possible. If you’re rewarding the one that books the most meetings on Tuesday morning, make sure that everyone knows what you’ll be tracking. In Salesforce, it can be the number of accepted meetings from 9 AM to 12 PM. Thus, to make it fair, you’ll check the meetings created date/time and the acceptation date/time.

Some tools might be helpful in this process. For example, the Salesforce Cloud Scheduler keeps track of all the invitee responses so you can see which one accepted the meeting request. This tool will avoid cheating as it’s quite easy to create fake meetings in the system, but it’s much harder to phony meeting acceptations.

Make it fair

However, some sales reps might cheat by waiting for the contest to log their meetings in the system. Let’s take an example. The Sales manager wants to organize an incentive this Wednesday as the sales activity was below average Monday and Tuesday. He wishes to measure the number of meetings booked. Apparently, some sales reps already scheduled some meetings Monday and Tuesday whereas others didn’t book anything. Giving credits to those who already plan some meetings will dissuade sales reps from cheating.