5)      Provide incentives for things with small weights, which in the end is meaningless. Or put differently: less than 10% in the total economy of the bonus won’t boost morale of any real performers. In other words: put the money in the lottery, it still does not change behavior but at least have a minimal chance to win something.

6)     Reward actual competence and not development. Here it is my favorite: a system that pays around 10% on competence of the poor sales person. These 10% are also split among minimum 10 other competence elements (i.e. selling skills with their steps, planning, presentation, time management, reporting, product knowledge, industry knowledge, customer management and many others). Now each of them has some level of proficiency from let’s say from 1 (minimum) to 4-5 (maximum). Hope that these competence elements do not have also different weights! Imagine any way you want the computation system and tell us what difference ($$$) will make for someone to spend one or two days to become expert in let’s say knowledge of product one out of three or four? You may say it will make a difference in sales, which is hopefully true, but then my question is why bother to include these competences in incentive calculation system; why not just leave the sales then?

7)     Link the incentive system with the nominal salary and not to some agreed benchmark. (In a similar way we increase salaries too, by a well calculated percentage year after year). The rich get richer and the poor get poorer! The difference… we have a system for it!

     Pay on nothing else but market share or gain of market share. Although I have to admit there are some circumstances where this way can have some relevance, implementing such policy on a long time may put at risk a number of company values that were gained over a long and sometimes painful process.

(to be continued)

Filed under: Field Force Managers, Sales Force Effectiveness by admin