Incentive programs can motivate your staff to new heights,
but make certain you sidestep counterproductive mistakes
The most common mistakes in installing incentive programs often stem from three shortcomings on the part of sales managers.
First, a manager's natural tendency is to assume that salespeople are motivated by the same things he or she is. This leads him/her to get together with other managers to plot out an incentive program with prizes that please them, not realizing that salespeople most often have different drives.
A second, more dangerous source of error is the attitude that salespeople are not as important as management. Since becoming good at sales is often an intuitive process, many excellent salespeople do not have, or need, a strong educational background, while managers tend to pride themselves on their education. This can lead managers to emphasize their own sense of value in incentive plans, while attempting to discount to some extent the hard knocks methods and styles that salespeople often rely on.
The third most common source of incentive mistakes is mimicking the competition. Sales managers frequently design an incentive contest that matches a competitor's promotion prize for prize. But if you want your sales force to be original and to outstrip the competition, then it stands to reason that your incentive program needs to be original and outstrip the competition's as well.
Keeping these points in mind, we have come up with the following list of mistakes often made in preparing an incentive program:
- Trying to Keep Everybody Happy
- Failing to Separate Novices from Veterans
- Negative Reward on High Productivity
- Targeting Prizes Toward the Wants of the Entire Sales Force Instead of the High Performers
- Planning a Contest with No Sales Force Input
- Leaving Top Management Out of the Plan
- Being Inflexible
- Hoping for X While Rewarding Z
- Forgetting that Good Salespeople Always Work for Their Own Good First, Not the Company's
- Being a Do-Gooder
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