New Article for Harvard Business Review

Organization Leadership: 3 Mistakes to Avoid When Setting Incentives for Sales Teams

When discussing sales performance, it’s almost Pavlovian for executives to bring up compensation as the main driver of success. This is not surprising, given that in most B2B companies, compensation represents the largest line item in the sales budget.

Financial rewards can drive attention, focus, and even effort, but more money doesn’t make people better at earning your client’s business. Effective sales leadership is the key to improving the performance of your salespeople, creating greater value in the market and winning more business.

The three common mistakes are:

1. Creating complex compensation plans to reward internal metrics

2. Using SPIFFs to drive individual product sales

3. Depending on discounts to win business

If you want to learn more about this topic and get ideas on what to do instead, read the article I co-wrote with sales strategist Lisa Earle McLeod for Harvard Business Review. 3 Mistakes to Avoid When Setting Incentives for Sales Teams.

Individual Leadership: Don't Forget Your Front Lines

As Maggie Wideorotter, currently the Chair of the Board at DocuSign says, “The front line is your bottom line.” Executives must make sure they stay in touch with the realities of the business. And it’s the front lines – where people are building your products, delivering your services, and likely spending more time with your

customers than anyone else – where your strategy comes to life.

Here are three ways you can maintain a strong connection with your front-line

teams.

1. Informal group conversations. Consider hosting an occasional coffee or simple luncheon with a handful of employees.
2. Recognize an individual effort. Ask the employee who is being recognized what else you ought to know or what action you might take to ensure this kind of outstanding performance occurs more frequently.
3. Talk with customers. Learn from businesses that chose competitive alternatives to working with you and customers who are dissatisfied, as well as those who are satisfied.

Just remember – it is always hard for leaders to extract direct and candid feedback, and the higher up in the org chart you sit, the more difficult it is. You’ll need to give people permission to share their thoughts and perspectives without consequences.

For Fun

I posted this on LinkedIn when we returned from our Spring Break, and I’m sharing it here as well.

During a Spring Break trip last week with my family, we stopped by the airport

bookstore. It was wonderful to see Harvard Business Review's 10 Must Reads on High Performance that includes the article I co-authored with Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman, Making Yourself Indispensable.

For a split second my daughters looked at me with pride. Then they said, “Can we go now, we’re hungry?!” 😂

LinkedIn Live

Compensation is a poor substitute for leadership and strategy when it comes to driving high performance – learn what to do instead.

Join me and my co-author, Lisa Earle McLeod, for a special edition of LinkedIn Live as we dive into the key ideas from our latest Harvard Business Review article:

“3 Mistakes to Avoid When Setting Incentives for Sales Teams.”

We’ll break down the most common incentive pitfalls we’ve seen in our research and work with clients —and share smarter, more effective approaches you can use instead.

📅 Tuesday, April 15

🕙 10:00 AM ET

Sign up here

Watch this short video to see how I work and the impact it creates.