How to Screw Up Your Sales Incentive Programs

Here are some of the mistakes that we often see companies make when attempting to design an effective sales incentive program.  These mistakes can turn your program into one that is very ineffective at best or harmful at worst.  Implementing bad incentive programs can be money down the drain.

Creating Conflict Within or Between Departments

Make sure that your rules don’t conflict with the other department procedure or worse with performance improvement programs they may have in place. You will always have some conflict, but you can work to optimize operations so that the conflicts are less likely to occur.  Consider rewarding cross-functional teams as a part of the program

Motivating the Wrong Outcome

The easiest of these to check is getting increased sales without corresponding profit, or leaning too heavily on profit that you decrease wanted sales increases.  Look for a balance in what you want your outcomes to be.

Don’t Have a Top Stop

Unless you have a product availability or service issue or will have undue increased operating costs concurrent with dramatic incremental sales results, don’t put a cap on performance.  Top stops will eventually de-incentivize outstanding performers--or at least limit their overall performance.  You can adjust rules structures for “windfalls” that may occur if necessary.

Protect Current Business While Motivating for New Customers.

Salespeople will be the first to see they can earn incremental commissions by focusing on new customers over current customers.  You can and should adjust rules structures to accommodate for this possibility.  One way is to simply set a “must maintain” type of rule in order to earn for new business, or tie the new business earnings structure to the maintenance of current business. 

Reward Behaviors Your Salespeople Control. 

Move your objectives to the lowest possible level that your salespeople can control.  Nothing will kill a sales incentive program faster than tying it to unreasonable objectives or to corporate objectives out of their control. 

Compete Your Salespeople Against Themselves

It has been standard practice for managers to compete their salespeople against other company salespeople.  Don’t!  You should want them trying to beat the brains out of your external competition.  The most successful incentive programs challenge salespeople to want to excel on their own.

For more information on Ultimate Choice Inc.’s products or services contact us at Ultimatechoiceinfo@cox.net

The Cost of Incivility

Every day you can encounter incivility in the workplace.  Every day you can see rudeness given to an employee, a customer or to yourself.  Every day, customers leave that place of business never to return.  What does that cost? 

Everyone who experiences workplace incivility will respond negatively, in some cases overtly. When an employee feels disrespected they are less likely to work with engaged effort and many just get tired of it and leave.  What is the cost of turnover?

Research tells us that incivility is expensive.  It also tells us that few companies actually recognize it or take action to curtail it. 

We’ve all heard of (or experienced) the “boss from hell.” The stress of ongoing hostility from a manager takes a toll, sometimes a big one, but unchecked rudeness can be surprisingly common.  This is especially the case when the recurring incivility comes from the C-suite. Oftentimes the managers who are uncivil don’t even realize they are that way.  There’s an adage in sports that “you can’t coach speed.”  So to it is very difficult to change a uncivil person’s character type or personality save a threat of job loss.  And unfortunately in that regard there is a tremendous emphasis by companies placed on the cost of litigation as a solution.  Believe it or not, the opposite can occur, the person being offended is at risk of losing their job so the company can avoid the conflict altogether.  No wonder unchecked incivility is so common.

The Costs of Incivility

While all managers must realize that incivility is wrong, many don’t recognize the true costs.  Through a poll of 800 managers and employees in 17 industries, research found in Harvard Business review conducted by Christine Porath and Christine Pearson found that of employees who had faced incivility:

•        48% intentionally decreased their work effort.

•        47% intentionally decreased the time spent at work.

•        38% intentionally decreased the quality of their work.

•        80% lost work time worrying about the incident.

•        63% lost work time avoiding the offender.

•        66% said that their performance declined.

•        78% said that their commitment to the organization declined.

•        12% said that they left their job because of the uncivil treatment.

•        25% admitted to taking their frustration out on customers.

Obviously People are less likely to buy from a company with an employee they perceive as rude, even when the rudeness isn’t directed at them.

At a time when employee engagement is high on ever company’s priority list, it just makes good sense to do all you can to eliminate incivility in your company. An added benefit of incorporating an employee recognition reward effort and put it in the hands of front line management is that it will uncover incivility.  This disrespect is easy to spot when you’re looking for just the opposite.  Every time you reward respect you reduce the tendency toward incivility. And turn this negative into a positive.  When you model good behavior you will influence good behavior.

For more information on Ultimate Choice Inc.’s products or services contact us at Ultimatechoiceinfo@cox.net

The Customer / Employee Experience Link in Service Centers

We find all the recent attention given to the importance of linking a satisfied customer and an engaged employee to be quite startling. Why?  Well because for as long as we can remember didn’t we all just know that when we have pleasant, happy and engaged employees helping the customer that a positive customer experience followed?  “The customer was always right” was the model which exhorted the service staff to give high priority to customer satisfaction.  We traded where we were given the kind of service that pleased us; we usually avoided places where the experience was less than desirable.  Don’t we still do that?

I guess not.  Now it would seem that marketers are just waking up to the critical role that employees play in business.  Certainly the advent of the non-human connection built into the digital age has something to do with it.  We can literally stay in our own small cubical world, doing almost everything we need to do to live, and never interact with another human being unless it’s a call center employee we finally get to after going through three robots.

In a recent article from CMSWire.com, the author Phil Britt found that companies feel that a motivated and fully equipped workforce may have been critical to the customer experience in the past, but that employee engagement and enablement was at the bottom of their priority list, not the top. 

It is so easy today to let all the bells and whistles of the latest “app” or platform do all the work.  The sale is conducted from start to finish and you never connect with the customer.  In a customer contact center where constant turnover can be a major challenge, a positive, talented and engaged employee is much more likely to have a positive impact on the customer.  In many instances  your customers often prefer self-serve options for convenience, but this can also help with employee engagement by allowing your contact employees the time to focus on more challenging and value added customer interactions.

Recognition awards have long been a part of call center strategies to increase employee engagement. They work, they always have.  In most companies call center positions are entry level, fairly low salary or hourly positions where a small recognition award can be very meaningful.  These employees are usually the first contact point between the company and customer.  Every one of us has had the experience of dealing with these hard working employees.  And we know immediately which ones of them are engaged and which are not, which are tired and just going through the motions and which sincerely want to help.  Recognition, respect and meaningful thanks for good performance will go a long way in maintaining and even improving their engagement and corresponding customer satisfaction.

For more information on Ultimate Choice Inc.’s products or services please contact us at Ultimatechoiceinfo@cox.net

Not Another Employee Engagement Survey - Please

Are you really thinking of doing another employee engagement survey?  Do you really want to take on this huge annual project spend many months analyzing the data to  spend another couple months planning what to do with it in order to take action a year or more after on whatever was driving those scores in the first place?

Maybe more frequent data collection to uncover short term issues with a program designed to address performance improvement issues on the spot would be a better use of your time and money?  These frequent short term surveys, referred to as pulse surveys, offer the ability to quickly and frequently measure feedback within entire groups.  You can judge real time engagement and react accordingly. Think of these as a way of gathering data that is current, rather than on an annual basis.  Reacting in a timely manner can often make all the difference.

Traditionally, employee engagement data has been reported in the aggregate when it is really a metric about individuals.  Why not design the survey to specific needs and challenges and not ask everyone the same question? This would lead to more targeted action, better supervision of performance improvement issues, and the ability to use proven techniques of employee recognition to drive results. The one area of concern in an individual approach is that the data would no longer be anonymous, but frankly, there’s not much about attitude and performance that is anonymous in any case.  If you want to improve discretionary effort you can look for the signals of them in the data that point directly to it.

The safety industry for years has been using the psychological based principles of behavior to improve safety performance.  This approach observes performance that can lead to accidents and rewards individuals who perform those safe behaviors in the described manner.   This just in time approach to changing performance can be done to improve performance on any number of the issues that help to build employee engagement throughout the organization, not just safety.

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Instead of another employee engagement survey, and considering the new technologies and analytical tools we have, isn’t it time to experiment with new approaches to determine what kinds of data might help with that?

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