Speaker (Larry Weidel) explains why you should run contests and how to judge their success. He distinguishes two contest types: sales (temporary spike to get people to work harder and make more money) and growth (long-term contests aimed at increasing the organization’s base — more people, outlets, and permanent cash flow). The key message: define the exact result you want (your bullseye) and measure success by post-contest baseline changes (new people/outlets and sustained income), not just peak performance during the contest.
Let's talk about the number one reason to have a contest. You don't have to have a team to have a contest. You can run a contest for yourself. But what's the number one reason to have a contest? Do you know what it is? This is all about you becoming a pro. See, a pro does things, but you do it for a purpose. You do it for result. You want certain things to happen. You, when they don't happen, then you make your adjustment. If they don't happen to the extent that you expect it, you make an adjustment. But if you don't know exactly what it is that you want to have happen, it's like throwing a dart at an empty wall instead of having a bullseye up there where you know that you hit it or not. So what is the number one reason? Was two kind of. Well, it depends on what kind of contest you're running. If you're running a sales contest, obviously the number one purpose is more sales. When do you run sales contests? You run sales contests when you want to get people to work. You know they're lazy. Not only work by doing having these sales blitzes, they learn how to work harder. The process of setting records, it flushes the people who are not working to the back of the room. It's like a cleansing thing. It moves the best people, the hardest workers, the people to do it to the top. And it shuts up the complainers because now you're on a mission. And so lots of reasons to have sales contests. The main thing is more sales and more money. You want your paychecks to go up, but the trouble is it is temporary. These contests are a one time thing. If it's a one month, it's a five month, six month, one year. And you can't have them too long because they don't work long term contests, it's got to be short enough. But what happens is with a sales contest for that period of time, that's why you see the car dealers, they're running these sales by the end of the month and endless sales going on all the time because they're trying to get their people to work into focus and gotta, gotta have something to fire them up. But on the other hand, people who want to have long term growth, they're not after just they want long term growth, they want to have more money, but they want to have continuous streams. They want to build their continuous streams of money. They want it to go up and stay up. So if you are, well, we'll go down here. If you let's use this little example. You go out there and you have, let's just say a 90 day blitz, 90 day contest. Because people will, can do anything for about 90 days. Get them all excited, break it down. You have your, you know, your milestones and your checkpoints. If it's a sales contest, bang, make money. But then it's back down to whatever they were going down around this level. Once they have, the contest is over. It's going to be back down to what you were doing before. But if it is and you're happy because you got some big paychecks, you know, a lot of people run sales contests at the end of the year. Sales blitzes every November. We want to finish with a bang. We don't have money for Christmas. We want to set a record. Some people have it quarterly, but that's. These are just. People get tired of the same sales contest and eventually you're not getting the results you want. So you can't constantly do them or you have to be pretty clever. But if you want to go in and do the growth approach, what you're trying to do is have, let's just say you've been going along at this same level here. If you have a growth contest, same thing, more money could be, you hit the same numbers, but what your goal is is after they peak there, you want to have the income stream be at this level, not drop all the way down here. You don't want to drop. So what you're running is a growth long term. You want long term, you want more outlets. Here's what you. Here, here is the number one thing. Here is the number one thing. If you want growth long term, the number one purpose, how you judge your contest in sales, it's, you know, sales contest one time, it's people, you want to get more people, more outlets, people who can be outlets for you. You want to expand your base. The whole reason that you do these things when you run a contest is you want to come out on the other side in a position. When you run your contest, if you're a builder, you want to come out the other side where you have dramatically increased your regular cash flow, your base of operations. Let's just say down here, this was your base level of production somewhere at this level. But you run a contest, you pass out the awards of recognition. When it's over, the success of that contest is not how high you reached, but how you come out of the contest. And all of that will come. Well, you're from how many more people so your goal is more people. The only reason if you're running a growth contest, the only thing it see on the other, if you run a sales contest, what you're trying to do is to get them to work harder. You know, I've got a bunch of people, I want to get them to work harder. But it's like walking down the road. Most people are going to walk down the road about the same pace. Some people walk fast, some slow. Contest is like, let's pick up the pace, let's jog. If you're capable, let's sprint. Let's see who's the fastest one, who's the, you know, who can go the hardest and the fastest for the longest period of time, during this period of time, cover the most distance. Let's make money. I'm trying to get them to work harder. I'm trying to get more out of them temporarily. Because what happens after a race is over? After a race is over, they're going to go back to their normal level, right? If you have the same number of people, but if you go into a sprint with an organization, the idea is to get everyone on board. Depending on what your management levels, how your team structure is put in position is the goal of everybody is to get more people, get more people on board, more rookies, more trainees, more new managers. Grow your infrastructure of your team, grow your army, your so that once the contest is over and they settle down into their normal flow of business, they're going to do so much more because you got so many more people. This is not a temporary thing of just to get them to work harder. That's the sales approach here. You're after something big. You're after now money, like in sales. So you go beyond what the sales people want. You go beyond now money, now growth to where you can have permanent increase in money. So if you're running a contest or it's not just running contests, the same thing applies. You're running a new program. Let's say you go in there. So that's what we're talking about. There is if you're running contests, but the same thing. Should I run a contest or not? Should I or shouldn't I? Well, depends on your result. And then after it's over, that's how you measure. But it's the same thing of should I put in a new program, a new system, a new presentation, new training? The purpose of all of these things ultimately is to either on a sales standpoint, make more sales. It's either more sales or more people, we'll go up here. More people. So if you are a builder, you're building your organization, you're trying to get more outlets, don't be sidetracked because you're all excited. You have, you had a surge and you made more money and production went up temporarily. The success of it long term is did you open new outlets, did you get more people involved? Did you build more teams? Did you get some manager promotions? Did you swell up your armies, your permanent army side? That's the reason, the number one reason if you're a builder to run a contest is more people. Now, just like when you're you got a bullseye, you're throwing darts. If you know what that bullseye is, you're a whole lot more likely to hit it. Many people. The reason for this tape is many people run contests. Almost everybody, they run contests and they have no idea what they're trying to do other than trying to stir up activity and get people excited. They heard you're supposed to have contests. Pros know what they do, why they do it, and they are dead focused on the, not just any result, the exact results. So the purpose of this video is to give you insight that can help you turn into a pro in running contests. Bam, finito, pause. Blah, blah blah. Would be what's the purpose of running a contest? There are two kinds of contests. One gives you temporary results. One gives you permanent results. If your contest is going to be successful, you need to be focused on the exact results that you want. In addition, you need to be able to focus the energy of everyone competing so they know the main results. On one style, it's a temporary one time payoff. On another style, it's a lifetime payoff. Here's the insights that you need to become a pro on contests.
