Incentives – How To Avoid The Pitfalls

Sales expert Andy Preston on motivating your team to greater success

The “How can I best incentivise my staff so I get better performance from them?” question is an interesting one.

Because of the wide range of businesses that I work with, the staff concerned could range from serious under-performers, through to average performers, right up to people who the managers are very happy with in terms of achieving targets, but just want more from them!

If you’re in the situation where you’re wondering about introducing incentives the following may help….

1. What behaviour are you trying to encourage?

Do you want increased activity? Increased financial figures? Improvement in morale? The team to work better as a “unit”? Depending on what you are looking for, you need to design any kind of incentive system around it.

2. Do you have the team’s “buy-in”?

Will all the team be motivated to achieve what you want, based on the incentives you’ve offered? Do they actually want to win it? For example, in a typical sales team the “standard” is to award high performance over a year in terms of sales achieved. If however, the prize can only be won by one person (usual examples are a car for a period of time, or a holiday etc) then if 6 months into the year if one person is way ahead of the rest, then it may result in the rest of the team “giving up” on the incentive and actually demotivating them and reducing their activity and performance levels.

3. How are you planning to track, monitor and enforce it?

Most incentives are introduced without much thought (beyond the basics) of how to monitor and enforce it. However we know salespeople are creative people and if they can find a way around it or a loophole, believe me they’ll find it! Every eventually has to be thought about before introducing the incentive and how it will be tracked, monitored and enforced at every step of the way. Most important of all, the incentive must be simple and the process easy to understand so as to avoid confusion.

4. How long is the incentive period for?

As a general rule of thumb, the longer the incentive period is, the less impact it has. For any incentive period longer than a month, be prepared for having to work hard to keep the team focused and motivated towards it. Salespeople generally tend to be attracted to the “latest thing” and keeping their attention on a long, drawn-out incentive period can be challenging.

5. What size of incentive are you offering?

Again, a general rule of thumb is the longer the period, the bigger the offering, and the bigger the increase in performance, the bigger the offering! However, don’t think you have to have a huge incentive to get people motivated, quite the reverse can sometimes be the case!

Andy Preston is a sales expert works with sales teams and organisations to improve their performance. To find out more visit www.outstanding-results.co.uk