In this video Ryan Dohrn shares practical incentive ideas aimed at getting prospects to sign contracts faster. He distinguishes between ongoing spend‑based incentives and the specific, time‑sensitive incentives that move a deal to close. He outlines several tactics: (1) applying a hard deadline to a discount and using a de‑escalating discount schedule (e.g., 30% off this week, 20% off two weeks later, etc.); (2) offering bonus inventory or impressions that increase the value of the advertised package if the client signs by a set date; (3) providing future‑service credits such as a free additional ad or a larger ad for signing early; (4) emphasizing that many of these incentives cost little because they leverage existing inventory. He stresses the importance of training salespeople to enforce expiration dates, being willing to let the incentive lapse if the deadline is missed, and encouraging creative, organization‑wide brainstorming of incentive ideas. The video ends with a call‑to‑action for companies to hire him for sales training.
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What's going on, friends and fans? Ryan Dohrn here, your friendly neighborhood sales coach. This week we're digging in on what you can do to be successful with incentive programs. Now, we could take this conversation 100 different ways to Sunday, but I want to focus in on incentives that hopefully will help you close deals faster. Now, some of the things that are also incentive-based— we'll talk about it real briefly— might be for every $100 somebody spends, they get $10 in bonus cash they can spend towards future buying with you. For every $1,000 they spend, they get $100, or whatever you want to set that up. Those really aren't the exact incentives I'm talking about. Those incentives are great. What I'm talking about is the incentives to get people to sign. So one of the biggest struggles we have in the sales business is what do we do to move the needle get people off their duff and get people to sign these darn agreements. So let's talk about some of the things that I like to do. Now, one of the first things that you can do is put a time limit on the price that you've given. So typically the price product that you're providing is going to be something that maybe there's a 20% discount if you sign by the end of the month. Or you could do a de-escalating incentive. You could say if you sign this week, it's 30% off, just as an example. I know some of you aren't into discounting, I get that. If you wait 2 weeks, it's 20% off. If you wait 3 weeks, it's 10% off. And if you wait a month, there's no discount at all. Now, some of you might say, well, Ryan, I just don't really like, you know, to play games with people. Well, what's interesting is games get people thinking, and actually most people like playing games, just to be honest. So when you think through this, you've got to be asking yourself, what are the incentives that I can put in place that potentially would encourage somebody to sign faster? A de-escalating discount is something that does work in a lot of businesses. Now, if you don't like discounting, let's talk about people getting bonuses. Just as an example, I live in the world of advertising sales like a lot of you that watch the show and listen to the podcast. So as an example, We're gonna sell advertising in terms of CPM or impressions. So let's just say somebody wants to buy 100,000 impressions of a banner ad campaign. I could say, if you're able to sign by Friday, I can actually take that 100,000 and make it 150,000. But by next week, I've gotta free up that inventory and I've gotta give that inventory back to other salespeople to sell. So what you can do though is get 'em excited about, wow, if I sign by then, I'm actually going to get a bigger advertising package than I would have normally gotten if I can sign by Friday. Now, some people say to me, yeah, but if they call you back on the next Wednesday, are you really not going to give it to them? Well, I'm in a unique situation. The answer is I typically don't. It really depends upon the circumstance, but typically I don't. If the expiration date is Friday, the expiration date is Friday. Now, if they've been a super valuable customer, I've had them as a customer for a lifetime. I'm probably going to honor it. But typically, incentives to sign are only as good as your ability to train people. Get off their duff and sign on the dotted line. Guess what? They're going to lose that particular incentive. All right, let me give you another example, and this is used by a lot of different companies. If you sign by a certain date, We're gonna give you more money for future services or for future spending. So again, using an advertising example, if you buy 3 ads and you sign by Friday, you'll get a 4th ad free. Or if you buy 4 ads and you sign by Friday, I'll double the size of the 4th ad. Do you kind of see where I'm going? So the interesting thing about this, friends, is that these incentives are not hard to come up with. So if you don't like discounting, let's set that aside. Aside. Like, Ryan, we don't discount. Okay, that's fine. Set the discount aside. Then what you're doing is you're actually incentivizing them to sign, but you're doing good things for them that don't typically cost you more money. Like giving them another 50,000 impressions— it's really not going to cost you anything. Taking somebody from a half-page ad to a two-thirds— you already got to print the half-page ad anyway. Be thinking about what incentives can we come up with That would get somebody really excited to sign on the dotted line and potentially get more or buy more from us. Now, some of you might say, because you're cynics out there, and that's okay, live your life, right? Live your best life. Some of you might just say, hey, Ryan, we don't have any flexibility. There's nothing that we can do to get somebody to sign faster. I'm just telling you, friends, I disagree. Get together. Get creative because almost everything in life is based upon an incentive. If you sign by this, if you buy this, if you buy 2 of these, you get this. If you think about your life, almost everything operates that way. Even in your love life, in your personal life, if you're nice, it almost always works out better for you, right? I mean, at least it has for me. I've been married 28 years, so I must be doing something right. I'm incentivizing positive behavior, right? So Think about it, friends. What could we do as an organization to incentivize people to sign with us in a quicker way? And if you sit down and come up with creative ideas, guess what, friends? Creativity almost always wins out. Hey friends, never forget, if sales was easy, everybody'd be doing it. They're not. We're not crazy. It's a great career. It'll feed your family for a lifetime. I promise. Hey, I'd love to come and train your sales team. Love to come motivate your group at your national sales meeting. Reach out to me over at ryandohrn.com.
