Corporate Holiday Gift Ideas for Sales Managers

This corporate holiday gift ideas post is brought to you by our friends at Ambition, the software solution where modern sales leaders manage their reps. ‍

The life of a sales manager tends to be chaos. They’re wearing a lot of hats: from tracking and analyzing sales performance data, to coaching their reps and juggling 1:1s, to hitting “The Number” every week, month and quarter — if you’re a sales manager, it probably feels like every hour of every day is accounted for.

The holidays only compound the craziness, as we’re all working to close out Q4 with a bang. If the sales managers in your org could use a lift to hit quota — or if you’re a sales manager yourself who is thinking ahead to 2020: here are five corporate holiday gift ideas that should be on every sales manager’s wishlist this year.

5 Corporate Holiday Gift Ideas for Sales Managers

1. Creative Incentive Ideas

The end of Q4 comes with a lot of distractions — but for a lot of potential buyers, it’s…well, buying season. How do you keep sales reps’ eyes on the prize? Easy: come up with a really great prize. It doesn’t have to be expensive, it just needs to be creative, fun and fast, so you canWith so much going on, sales managers may not have time or brainpower to dream up fresh ideas — so here are a couple of our own to get those creative juices flowing.

• The “shower strike”: Hear us out. This can be an effective (and kind of hilarious) sales incentive. The concept: team hits [insert goal], manager goes (3? 5? 10?) days without a shower. A simple shared incentive does double duty by driving team collaboration, while scoring you a big culture win.
• Celeb shout-out: An Ambition account executive recently closed the largest deal in company history. For a (relatively) nominal fee, our CEO managed to get a personalized video message from Andruw Jones of Atlanta Braves fame — which was thrilling for our AE, perhaps the biggest Braves fan of all time.
• Billboard competition: While this incentive has become a Q3 Ambition tradition, it can be done at any time of year. Essentially, whoever closes the most revenue over a certain period of time is awarded a one-month billboard placement — winner chooses location and design. It’s the definition of a smart incentive: something you desperately want, but would never buy yourself.

2. Automated Sales Coaching Tools

We firmly believe 2020 is the “Year of the Sales Coach.” That means sales managers are going to be doing less people management, and focusing more on the development of their reps — with the goal of driving long-term behavior change.Successful sales coaching impacts every part of a sales organization: from reps to managers to enablement to leadership to the very bottom line. Suffice it to say, if sales managers are equipped with the resources they need to coach effectively, everyone wins. Time is one of the biggest challenges when it comes to sales coaching. Many sales managers simply don’t have enough hours in the day to launch individualized coaching programs  — which is why automation is so critical to sales coaching success.Give a sales manager in your life the gift of efficiency. Again, it doesn’t have to cost you a cent: you can download free sales coaching templates and sales scorecard templates from Ambition’s template hub to see how sales experts from brands you trust run their own programs.(Alternatively, if you’re ready to automate everything and take sales coaching to the next level, you can get a free look at Ambition’s sales coaching and gamification platform here.)

3. Updated Swag

Swag is too often an afterthought or check-the-box kind of initiative, but it can actually be a powerful culture-building and sales tool.Everyone loves free stuff — but the best kind of swag is the swag that gets used day in and day out. That’s why every fall at Ambition, we make a point to give our employees a nice piece of winter-wear, embroidered with our logo — e.g., a fleece, vest or sweatshirt that our whole team will appreciate as we head into the cooler months.Sure, it’s not the most novel swag concept, but because we make an investment in quality and take into consideration what our employees actually need, our swag is sought-after by our team (and often, their family members). And 9 times out of 10, someone is wearing their swag when you walk into our office on any given day. (That includes the summer, when the A.C. is blowing full force.)Aside from making your team smile, swag gets your brand out into the world — and of course, it’s a great direct mail tool that both sales and marketing can leverage for prospects, partners and more.

4. New and Improved* Sales Leaderboards

*“Improved” is the key word here. If you’ve got sales TVs up and running, your team probably understands how important sales floor recognition is — it can take energy, engagement, and visibility to a whole new level.The problem: Only 10% of reps will ever show up on a traditional leaderboard. If you feel like your TVs aren’t having the impact you hoped they would, it could be because the same reps are showing up, over and over againThere’s a simple fix for this — sales managers need the ability to leverage “Most Improved” leaderboards. In conjunction with a strategic coaching program, Most Improved leaderboards are the perfect way to high-five the people who are clearly doing the right activities and behaviors and growing into stronger, more effective sellers, even if they’re not yet top performers.

5. Slack Triggers and Alerts

Accurate, individualized sales performance data is critical for sales managers — but if it’s not available in real time, it’s much less powerful.

When sales managers (and sales teams, and even entire sales organizations) can see meetings set or deals closed the very second they happen, every little win gets recognized. That’s so important — because as we know, little wins lead to big wins.

You’re probably already leveraging triggers and alerts on your office sales TVs, but make sure they’re reaching everyone by deploying them to Slack, where your team is likely spending most of their time on a day-to-day basis. A Slack integration is also a great way to keep your remote team looped in, since they may not have their eyes on an office TV when the triggers go off.

The best part about all five of these corporate holiday gift ideas is that they can still be used for your sales kickoff in Q1 or as incentives all year long. Happy gifting!

‍Looking for more corporate holiday gift ideas? Grab a copy of our 2019 holiday gifting guide by clicking here or on the image below!