Hey.

How ya doin?

I am Joe’s Incentive Plan and I’m not very happy, so listen up.  I got something to say.

Don’t worry, Joe can’t hear us – he’s not thinking about me right now, which is an amazing and rare thing.  He’s in the system now trying to figure out how to add another contact with a different address cuz’ he needs to send the quote to yet another guy in the decision making process….

You probably don’t know this but….

Joe swears at me sometimes.  Like bad.  He does.   And that hurts.  We’re supposed to be close.

Usually it happens at the end of the week or the month when we’re walking down the hall together;   I’m computing away figuring out his paycheck in our head and all of a sudden he’s calling me this and that and how much I stink and how stupid I am and how I like other people more than him and that it’s not fair.  Except he really lets it fly with words I’ve never seen – even though I’m 13 pages long if you include the sign off page.

And then I get ticked off.  I gotta live with this guy and he freakin’ hates me.   I know some things though.  I really do.    And you guys got it wrong.

I’m too smart.  I’m too complex.  I’m too long.   And I knew it when you built me two years ago as you passed me around in all those Reply All’s picking me apart with everyone adding their drivel.   I knew it too when you made me sit for 40 days on that HR SharePoint site where I had nothing to do but look at my pathetic, drug out, butchered self until you’ll finished your Turkey dinners or something.

Then I sat in like 5 more meetings getting longer and longer and with as many asterisks as Barry Bonds will have (what you don’t think I read? His incentive plan is legend).

Let me just say what I know is in my DNA about the best Incentive Plans, before Joe gives up on the CRM and (I’ve seen him do this) jumps in the car and delivers the proposal himself;

Rule 1: A New Incentive Plans’ complexity should be of inverse proportion to the degree of change or results needed.  That’s a fancy way of saying that the bigger the degree of behavior/results changes you need Joe and his group to make – the simpler I must be.

Rule 2: Quit putting specific products/ qualifiers all over me.   Your products and focus aren’t going to stay the same.  Joe isn’t going to be asked to sell the same thing every month or in some cases even the same day.  Get Real!  Give me letter designations like  A, B, C, D.  That gives you and Joe the flexibility to change focus in the business on a dime.

Rule 3: I don’t want to be computing all the way down the darn hallway.  Make it as much as you can, something that  when Joe is done for the day or the week, he’s knows what $$ we made and doesn’t need a degree in calculus and blackmail photos to  use against the Reporting and Analytics guy to get him to run numbers .  Stock broker guys don’t have to do it, nor do the waiters or the brain surgeons.

I gotta go, Joe figured it out in the system.  Now he’s thinking about me again.  Do me a favor; help us enjoy our walks down the hallway.  I don’t want to fight anymore.

Till next time,

Grow The Business.

Mark

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