The Harvard Business Review Sales Management Handbook

8. Motivating Sales Teams with Incentives and Goals

Most sales forces use incentives—monetary payments, usually on top of a base salary, that reward people for achieving and exceeding goals. When sales efforts produce results that can be measured, incentives are an effective way to motivate your team. They become even more important when salespeople work mostly unsupervised.

After salaries, incentives are usually the largest single item in sales force costs. When things go wrong, no program gets as much scrutiny and blame from employees and leaders. And when the sales organization faces new challenges, adjustments to incentive programs are often on the short list of potential solutions. Yet incentives are hard to get right. While they can ...