Sales incentive for Sales Team – Company in the Oil & Gas Equipment & Services Sector

Our Client, a large provider of Oil & Gas Equipment with operations across the Middle East was keen on updating its sales incentive structure to better align rewards with business performance in a wholistic fashion instead of merely linking it to sales revenue. Our expertise as Human Resources Consultants made us the perfect partner for this intervention.

We partnered the HR team and identified the key business drivers and measures that were within the sphere of influence of the sales team and were more closely aligned to sales excellence and overall business performance than just sales revenue. These included Gross Profit or Margin, Net Profit for the Business Unit, and specific individual targets for sales personnel like new customers, targets on new products or a specific line of products & services. To each a specific weightage was assigned, and a minimum achievement threshold set to qualify for pay-out of incentives. A sliding scale was deployed that allowed significantly higher rewards at the upper end of the scale.

The business saw a stronger linkage between business results and the incentive pay-outs and lent an increased ability to drive specific business outcomes and sales excellence. The other plus point lay in the flexibility to support specific initiatives by building links into the sales incentive structure. Across the board, the stakeholders in the sales team perceived the revised scheme as more equitable and connected directly to their efforts and drove sales accordingly. They also stopped trying to sell merely on price, and began to sell on value and benefits, thus transforming the customer value-proposition which effectively helped achieve business partnerships where earlier it was more transactional sales.