Incentive Program Design: How Do I Pick a Goal for My Incentive Program?

Incentive Program Design: How Do I Pick a Goal for My Incentive Program?

Nichole Gunn

Incentive Program Design Goals

You know that you want to create an incentive program to help you accomplish your business objectives. But where do you start? When it comes to incentive program design, the first step is determining a goal for your program. Your goal will inform how you structure the rest of your program.

When picking a goal for your incentive program, it’s important to sit down, look at your situation, and determine where an incentive program creates the biggest opportunity for growth. Who can you incentivize to make the biggest impact? For example, would you get a bigger ROI from incentivizing your customers or from incentivizing your sales reps? Are there any weak points in your organization or bottlenecks in your channel that an incentive program could help you address?

A Look Inside the BthruB Incentive Program Playbook

Answering these questions will help you choose the type of incentive program you want to run. An incentive program can improve multiple aspects of your organization. But for effective incentive program design, you should limit your focus to one or two primary goals for your incentive program.

Page 10 in the BthruB Incentive Program Playbook provides a guide for helping you determine a goal for your incentive program.

Incentive Program Design Goals

As you can see, it’s important to keep your goals SMART. That stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Results-driven, and Timely.

Specific: Identify what you are trying to accomplish and why this goal is important. Figure out how you are going to accomplish this goal. Choosing a specific goal will help you focus your efforts. The more specific you are, the more likely you will be to achieve it!

Measurable: Numbers don’t lie. Effective incentive programs are measurable. You should pick a goal that you can track your progress towards and calculate an ROI. This is where incentive program KPIs come into play.

Achievable: It’s great to shoot for the moon but be realistic. Challenge yourself, but make sure your goal is attainable. Doing so will help you get buy-in from other members of your organization and enable you to design a program that can accomplish your goal. You can always optimize, improve, and add additional promotions once you’ve already nailed down your initial strategy.

Results-Driven: Begin with the end in mind. It might be helpful to take the time to write down exactly how achieving your goal will benefit your company. This will help you stay motivated and focused.

Timely: Create a timeline and stick to it. Time limits create a sense of urgency and let you monitor your progress.

After you’ve determined your goal, write it down! Doing so will make you 40% more likely to achieve this goal. OK, now let’s take a look ahead at what comes next!

Need Help with Incentive Program Design?

Once you have determined your objective and are ready to take the next steps with incentive program design, we strongly encourage you to download our new incentive program e-book.