This article is closely associated with the articles titled "Running a productive sales-team meeting" because much of the competitive spirit needs to be generated during those staff meetings.

Competition can breathe life into any sales organization and is an essential element for sustainable growth. What is often overlooked, though, is how competition, if managed incorrectly, can lead to both successful reps and innovative managers holding onto their best-practices.

If this hoarding of information continues unabated the gap between the productive and non-productive employees widens. As the gap widens jealousy and resentment increases and any chance of cooperation is lost.

As the leader of a team, channel or organization it is your responsibility to force the issue and demand that all best-practices are shared and, as importantly, implemented.

The best sales people tend to be perceived as being selfish and having no interest in helping those around them. In my experience, this is not always the case.

Great sales people are like great athletes, they relish being challenged, especially if they will receive public recognition for meeting that challenge.

To better understand this take a moment to think through why recognizing performance can be such a powerful tool:

1. Targets are set.

2. The top sales people exceed their target.

3. Those employees receive public recognition.

4. The employees recognized thrive in the spotlight and enjoy being held as an example to their co-workers. They become determined to repeat their success to receive further recognition.

5. A large number of those who were not recognized become determined to be one of the sales people recognized next time - whether next month, quarter or year.

It is the deep desire for recognition, acknowledgment and acceptance craved by so many sales people that needs to be used to drive them to share their skills and to help develop those around them.

A few comments on a conference call or a few lines on an email can herald a new initiative or idea from one of your employees.

Take the time to think how best to position the message, give the person who developed the best-practice a chance describe how he/she has used it - this puts pressure on him/her to truly share and will quicken adoption of the initiative by his/her peers.

It only takes a handful of these instances to get the competitive juices flowing and suddenly you start to receive a regular flow of information which can then be shared with your entire organization.

The next step is to inspect which employees are actually using the new initiatives. Unfortunately, ego can often get in the way of using an idea or best-practice from a peer. You must force all leaders within your organization to understand how much more they could sell, how much more they could earn and how much easier they job will be if they become open to adopting ideas from their peers without prejudice.