Incentivise the behaviour, not the artefact
Call counts and pipeline coverage are easy to measure and easy to game. Preparation depth, collaboration and the quality of a growth case are harder, and they are what actually moves a number.
The session redesigns one incentive with the people it applies to.
Format
Half a day with sales leadership and enablement.
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Case study: The Innovation Games
A global enterprise software vendor paid its sellers to push one product each. Michael designed a supplementary set of measures that rewarded the one thing the pay plan ignored: solving a customer's problem with more than one team. Sellers registered customer challenges that ran past their own product, or where a competitor was putting the engagement at risk, and earned a small reward for the registration itself. Each challenge was matched with colleagues from other product teams.
Within five months, US$3 million in new sales had closed from combined solutions no single team could have built alone, with 19 new qualified opportunities and two new sales plays.
The figures carry three limits, stated in the case study: the attribution was not audited, there was no control group, and the programme ran for five months. What it can say is that five months and a modest reward budget produced deals and pipeline the KPI sheet had left on the table.
The Innovation Games is one of three gamification cases in Chapter 5 of The Sales Innovators, second edition.