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Incentives

Align sales team motivation with business goals, focusing their energy on customers and actions that directly fuel sustainable revenue growth

Incentive plans translate sales strategy and objectives into clear expectations
The right mix of fixed and variable pay focuses effort and setting an appropriate level of pay balances competitiveness with responsibility
Defining performance measures drives the right behaviours and outcomes, aligning payment with performance through thresholds, accelerators and other levers
Applying a transparent mechanism ensures sales-people know exactly how their actions convert into rewards

Here are three key factors to consider for an optimal incentives plan:

Define each role’s purpose and controllable outcomes
Benchmark market base pay and fixed/variable splits for comparable roles
Align the mix to sales strategy, increasing variable for growth roles and fixed for retention or long-cycle roles
Balance incentive impact to drive behavior without creating financial or cultural risk
Adjust base pay for skill, seniority, and deal complexity
Tie variable pay to a small set of clear, measurable performance metrics – keep it simple and also consider how a sales-person could “game” the plan

Balance motivation and financial control by defining when variable pay begins vs % of target
Align payout progressiveness with strategy, using accelerators or steady curves as appropriate
Apply decelerators where margin protection or behavior control is required
Review historical outliers to understand overperformance patterns
Set caps where necessary, positioning them as financial guardrails

Select and combine incentive mechanisms to balance motivation, fairness, simplicity, and financial control
Corporate: Use for service or support roles where impact is indirect and measured at brand, account, or regional level
Ranking: Apply to drive competition in small teams while managing collaboration risk
Commission: Use to create clear pay-for-performance, adding thresholds or caps to control cost and behavior
Goal based: Set where targets are accurate, to motivate achievable performance
MBO: Apply for qualitative or multi-dimensional roles, accepting higher complexity to balance outcomes

The company is a leader in dermal fillers and skin tightening treatment, producing pharmaceutical products, equipment and consumables.
The existing plans ranged from simple and almost undocumented to convoluted and confusing. In many cases they had overly generous low eligibility thresholds, lack of focus on strategic products and no measure of profitability or minimum sales price.
We harmonised the incentive plans across multiple teams and roles in 11 countries, to align with the objectives of the business, taking into account local market dynamics, regulations and strategies.
Through this process we also developed new sales roles within countries and evolved team structures and customer engagement models.

The company provides connectivity, cloud, security, unified comms, and IT infrastructure services to the public and private sectors.
As part of a holistic sales effectiveness diagnostic, we redesigned the incentive plan for the company’s UK field sales team. Some of the key improvements required to drive growth focused on strategic service types, more stretching goals, extra incentives for new logo acquisition and new services.
We developed a transition roadmap in the context of overall company transformation, including new sales roles, channels and customer alignment.

Read our perspective on why incentives matter more than ever and/or get in touch with us.