Show me the money!

I don't work in sales, rather I work with salespeople. Anyone who's ever done business-to-business sales knows that the work you did two months ago is what's making up next month's paycheck. It takes a while to see results of your actions.

What that creates is a situation where in the last month of the quarter, people work their asses off to meet their sales goals. During the first two months, they sit at their desks all slack-jawed and disoriented. This isn't good for me. Since a certain percentage of my income is bonuses based off of the performance of the sales team, the ebbs and flows of my income can be frustrating. Some months I have enough cash to buy shit I don't need. Other months I go into work raising hell because I have to ration my gas.

What all that blah blah blah comes down to is that I need some way to present an incentive to the staff to make me more money...oh. And themselves.

I got the idea last week when I was in the Jeep dealership that perhaps a sales contest forcing people onto teams would get them to see how their lack of activity effects other people. They had a bulletin board with a list of three sales teams and how many points they'd earned (I happened to notice that my sales guy was on the winning team). I would hate to be on the losing team, that's for damn sure.

I already have an idea of how I'm going to organize the contest, however what I need a little creative juice for is coming up with a prize that a group would enjoy.

Whatever the prize is, it has to be reasonably priced as I'll be paying for it personally (watch as Tiffany writes this off on her taxes as a business expense and gets audited!).

So, lend me your brainpower. What would you want your team (of 4 or 5) to win? Food? Toys? Gel pens?