The nature of most organization’s business is such that their overall success depends on the success of their sales force. An organization’s sales force is its face to the public – and a well motivated sales force can just as easily create a formidable brand as an ill motivated sales force can irreparably break a thriving brand.

It is in recognition of these facts that many organizations are increasingly investing heavily on their sales force incentive programs.

The main aim of launching a sales force incentive program is to keep the force highly motivated, aware of the damage an ill-motivated sales force can do to an organization. The underlying goal of a good sales force program is to get the sales force to have a sense of ownership of the organization they happen to be working for, so that they can see its success as their own success and its failure as their own failure. The opposite to this is having a sale force that doesn’t have a sense of ownership of the organization they are working for, where they get the idea that they are working for their bosses for instance, often leading to disastrous results. This is because in keeping with intrinsic human nature, they might often feel the urge to avenge on wrongs they feel their bosses might have done them during their sales missions, thereby doing the brand they happen to be promoting irreparable damage.

Most sales force incentive programs also seeks to exploit the competitive tendencies that are deeply ingrained in our psyches as human beings. Now this is only possible after first getting the sales force to have a sense of ownership of the organization and the brand. Having gotten to this step, the sales team coach can now get the members of the team to start competing in terms of how much they deliver in terms of sales units, for instance.

The financial incentive plays an important role in most sales force incentive programs too. This is generally implemented through a commission scheme – where the members of the sales force earn a commission on an incremental basis, depending on their delivery. Here we can have, for instance, a member earning commission at the rate of 5% per unit for every 1000 units, with the same rising to say 7.5% per unit for every 2,000 units and 10% per unit for everything above3,000 units sold. A common mistake made with regard to commission schemes however is to set too high targets for the various commission figures. When you do this, the people in question just give up on the whole commission thing – and decide to wait for the retainer (if you offer one) or to go looking for another job if no retainer is being offered.

Beyond the financial incentives, most modern sales force incentive programs also incorporate psychological incentives – where sales force members who are delivering are made to know that their stellar contribution is highly appreciated and that they matter to the organization and the organization’s fate rests with them (where that happens to be the case). And insignificant as this might seem – it sometimes proves to be even more effective than the financial incentive only, especially when properly implemented.