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Building Your Sales Incentives
There are a number of key elements that must be taken into consideration when creating and designing a sales incentive to suit your business needs. What is the structure, the reward, the end goal? These are all questions that need to be answered during the design process. This will ultimately be the real challenge when designing your sales incentive as it is vital to the mark and achieve the incentive's goals especially in the current economic climate.At Inconnection we have over a decade's worth of experience in creating bespoke sales incentives for some of the worlds biggest IT & telecomms companies. We are well placed to offer of expertise to our clients when creating their sales incentive to help maximise the outcome. Here are 9 key elements which we believe should always be taken into consideration when designing and creating your sales incentive.
1: Design
- Involve people in the design of their incentive
- Launch programmes that can be said to have been designed with "your input and your ideas"
- A truly effective incentive gains everyone's buy-in, everyone's buy-in defines an effective incentive
2: Team and/or Individual
- Consider the effect of individual targets and rewards on team work
- Consider the effect of team targets and rewards on team work and individual accountability
3: Measurements
- Results, outcome, effort, values, or performance based
- Reliability, availability, accuracy and frequency of measurements
4: Targets
- Decide balance between individual and team targets and incentives
- Remember targets themselves motivate - communication and buy-in dependant
5: Target to Rewards Structure
- Take care if considering a zero-sum game (i.e. if someone games the other loses) that it does not interfere with team work, or inter-team work and communication
- Consider the effect of thresholds and the effect if they are not being achieved
6: Structure & Administration
- Make the structure scheme easily understandable
- Ensure that any administration is as simple as possible
- Consider how to keep the whole audience involved throughout the period - tactical up weights
- A 10% performance improvement in 100 people or a 50% improvement in 10 people? Amongst a population of performers are where the best gains are
7: Communication
- Integrate with other communication activity
- Over-communicate by 100%. Effectiveness is vastly improved by excellent communication in sufficient quantities delivered through all appropriate media, this should be planned meticulously
8: Recognition
- Consider the power of recognition communicated through the programme
- Recognition is the most powerful motivator, an incentive communicates recognition most powerfully when it has everyone's engagement and buy-in and the scoring and results are public
- If the programme does not have buy-in from everyone and is not seen to be "fair" expensive de-motivation occurs
9: Reward
- An effective incentive reward enables people to have or experience something which ordinarily they would not have or experience
At Inconnection we motivate, reward and incentivise your key people. That's what we do best and we have the expertise to deliver exceptional results and help you achieve your business objectives.
