Game the Plan

Book excerpt: Create an incentive compensation plan knowing it will be gamed Tired of the reality that within five minutes of announcing an incentive plan someone on your sales team starts to find ways to game the plan? THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT! By gaming, sales reps are trying to achieve the goals you set out. Too many companies walk away from incentives thinking they create a scenario in which every win by a team member means a loss for the company. The only thing a “loss” means, though, is that you, the corporate leader, wrote a bad plan. Instead of fighting the gamers on your staff, build your incentive plan knowing that your sales reps will take every possible means to earn their badges, bonuses, checks, extra PTO days, or whatever other bait you dangle in front of them. Game the Plan’s revolutionary, three-pronged approach takes the guesswork out of creating the right plan by reviewing a combination of academic, experiential, and empirical data. And the self-assessment exercises will help you diagnose and fine-tune your company’s incentive strategy effectiveness. With several terabytes of proprietary information gleaned from industry leaders’ best practices behind him, Xactly Corporation Founder, President & CEO Christopher Cabrera offers you--for the first time ever--a way to intelligently harness the unique motivational composition of your workforce and systematically spike company-wide collaboration and profitability across every job function and department. This is not a guessing game, or something that comes from a gut feeling. This is your key to drive your employees to the right behavior by crafting a dialed-in incentive plan that motivates them to be more productive and loyal.