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Cleankill
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By Paul Bates, MD, Cleankill Pest Control
Incentivise all your teams – not just sales
I started my career in sales working for the largest pest control company in the UK – and probably the world. In this company, shareholders, not customers, were the most important people. This meant very demanding sales targets. To keep us focused on the goal, there were incredible incentives to match and unforgettable, glitzy sales ‘conferences’ at five-star venues. These incentives and the glory we were given as top salespeople – and I was one of those - was addictive.
But there comes a point were companies get too greedy and push their salespeople to sell services customers don’t necessarily need. At the same time the service and admin teams who aren’t sharing the same rewards have more work than they can cope with and are treated like the poor relations.
When I joined Cleankill Pest Control as Managing Director and started working with three former colleagues from the company mentioned above, we agreed that we’d take what we’d learned there and do it better – particularly making sure quality of service is as important as sales. After all it’s much better to keep a customer than try to fi nd new ones and then keep losing them due to poor service.
Today at Cleankill, incentivising all our staff is an important aspect of how we run the company. Staff across all levels of the business share in Cleankill’s success through financial incentives and non-fi nancial rewards like teambuilding events/ team lunches. For instance, Service Teams have to achieve quality of service targets. Any team achieving their targets is awarded money to spend on an afternoon activity of their choice and the whole team gets the afternoon off. These activities have included indoor skydiving, axe throwing, bowling and curling.
Our admin staff are linked to the service teams’ quality of service targets, which is a great way to encourage team working. It incentivises the admin team to make sure correct customer information is taken and communicated which is important for invoicing.
A ‘fun’ incentive, combined with a proper quality assurance check is called Wiff-Waff. This involves the directors hiding blue table tennis balls in rodent bait boxes. The idea is that technicians should be regularly checking all bait boxes to make sure there is still bait and clear any dead rodents. If they check every box, they will fi nd the balls. They receive a cash sum for each ball found. This is a fun incentive with an important message behind it.
For our sales staff their incentive is mainly fi nancial. If they work hard, the sky’s the limit as commission is open ended at Cleankill. But we do take them all away for an occasional night away in a nice hotel as they also need to team build and share ideas – particularly those who are new to sales having moved from the operational side of the business.
Bonus bonds are awarded to all staff when we achieve a record month enabling everyone to share in Cleankill’s success. Last year, all staff received a Christmas hamper in recognition of their efforts during 2022.
My best advice is to make sure your incentives are available to all staff – my company would fall apart if we didn’t have an excellent admin team, and they need to be recognised. And incentives don’t have to cost the earth. Our Wiff Waff challenge is cheap to run and brilliant fun. You just need a little creativity.
