Performance Incentives

Are your team’s incentives aligned with your priorities, or have you inadvertently created damaging disincentives? Are they incentivised at all?

Aligning performance based incentives with the vision for your agency can help to make that vision a reality. Really it’s just another way to make really clear what the business prioritises, and reward those who deliver on those priorities.

Business Development:
For most agencies, incentives usually exist in some form when it comes to business development. It’s usually pretty straightforward – a commission of some sort on work won.

Where I’ve seen it go off track is where there’s a misalignment in the type of work the agency wants to bring on, where execution capacity becomes a constraint, or where commission for an individual is capped to a certain amount.

The first of these is a simple communication issue. As a business you should have a very clear idea of who your target customer is, and your sales team should be working within those guardrails.

The second comes down to better capacity planning and working to forecast growth and become proactive with recruitment. Sure, easier said than done, but it’s something well worth putting the effort into.

The final one is bizarre to me. I can’t think of one single good reason to do this, and if you’ve got one I’d love to hear it!

Of course this is all predicated on the people we’re talking about even being motivated by sales targets and commission.

This sort of model aligns with most sales pros I’ve met. If it doesn’t seem to work for someone on your team but they’re still getting the sales you need, it’s worth a conversation to find out what kind of reward would motivate them. Not everyone wants more money! Maybe they want some additional annual leave or professional training.

Agency leaders, managers, and individual contributors.

For agency leaders and managers, I like some combination of incentives based on KPIs around thing like growth, profitability, client retention/feedback, staff satisfaction/retention.

I like the counterbalance of the pure growth/profit metrics with client and staff centric metrics. Focus too much on growth, you risk losing touch with existing clients. Too much on existing clients, you risk taking your eye off bringing new work into the agency. And lose focus on your team? The whole thing comes crumbling down.

For the ICs of the team, it’s difficult to incentivise them on those same metrics – they have far less control over some of them.

Where possible, looking at the outcome of the work (campaign performance, client growth/satisfaction) rather than the input (timesheets or # of tasks completed for example) is, in my mind, ideal for performance incentives.

If your team delivers measurably great work, it’s pretty likely your clients are going to stick around. Outside of incentives and KPIs, agencies should *always* be looking at ways they can demonstrably show value, rather than just talking about all the tasks or campaigns they’ve built.