What's the Best Incentive Compensation Strategy for Salespeople?

Harvard Business School Professors Doug Chung and Das Narayandas have conducted an interesting new study about compensation schemes for salespeople.  They conducted a field experiment with a Swedish electronics retailer.   The firm used a monthly quota system to motivate and reward salespeople.   The scholars tested the effect of shifting to a daily quota system.  What did they find? Overall revenue increased with the installation of a daily quota system. HBS Working Knowledge summarizes their conclusions:

They found that sales productivity increased by 4.9 percent, on aggregate, under the daily quota scheme. But the results were more dramatic among the lowest quartile of salespeople—those with the worst recent sales records in the company. That group saw an 18 percent increase in sales productivity under the daily quota.

Chung explains that low performers are susceptible to falling behind in a monthly quota scheme, becoming less motivated or less capable of meeting their quota the further they fall back. “So they just give up,” he says.

A daily quota, on the other hand, provides “a fresh start every day in which past performance does not affect current payoff and thus does not disturb current motivation,” the researchers write. “For high-performing salespeople, because they are more immune to the disutility of effort, even if they experienced bad luck earlier in the month, they would put in the additional effort necessary later in the month to meet their monthly quotas.”

However, this finding is not the end of the story.  The scholars also examined the type of products that these employees sold before and after the change in quota scheme.  As it turns out, the retailer sold many more low-priced goods with the new quota scheme, but fewer higher-priced, higher margin items.  Why?  The higher-priced items took more time to sell.  Thus, the daily quota system created a powerful incentive to push the items that were easiest to sell (the low-priced goods).  

What's the lesson of this story?  You have to decide what your strategic objectives are.  If you want volume, a more frequent quota makes sense.  If you are interested in being very successful at the high end of the market, then you do not want the quotas to be as short term in nature.