Dedicated Resource
Award submission needs to be someone’s job (or at worst, an important part of someone’s job). And, the budget needs to come from sales or marketing. Yes, there are implications for talent acquisition; but this is a revenue-generating activity and it should be treated as such. The KPI for the owner of this initiative is AWARDS WON. They will tell you this is out of their control, but it’s not. It is within their control and I would highly discourage any other KPI for this role.
Know and Segment
There are so many awards out there. You truly have no idea how many exist. It’s shocking. It’s a worthwhile exercise to identify the awards available given your type of business. Once you’ve identified the total potential, you should segment these awards by level of competition and effort. This will be important in a subsequent step.
Buy-In
You need the entire organization to understand how important these awards are. They need to know that if they want more GREAT team members and/or more GREAT clients, awards are critical. On average, prospects are reading 7+ pieces on companies they are meeting with before the sales meeting. Potential employees are doing the same. You need the buy-in because a lot of these awards come with surveys. And, you’re going to need the team to go out of their way to fill out surveys or work on submissions if you want to win.
You Don’t Need an Oscar
The reality is that some awards are more prestigious than others. The further reality is that having some awards that are less “prestigious” is a lot better than having none at all. Long story short, don’t spend all of your time working on super prestigious and super highly competitive awards. Have some balance. Apply for some “Oscars” and some “MTV Movie Awards.” 😂
Celebration
There has to be a regular cadence of celebrating the awards the company wins. I recommend quarterly. You should display the number of awards the company won in the previous quarter, and you should also have a cumulative running total. It’ll shock you when you hear team members talking about these totals to their colleagues, to their client, to their prospects, or to their friends.
Winning awards can be beneficial for businesses looking to grow their sales numbers and increase their incomes by up to 63%. If you put in the effort to apply for these programs and make sure all your documents are accurate and up-to-date then your chances of success will skyrocket. So get applying today!
