Established programs understand the constant pursuit: keeping upward momentum while keeping program budgets in check. It takes strategic moves, proactive planning and, for the longest-standing programs, a good hard look at what’s delivering the expected results, and where the underlying structure needs to evolve.
Think of your incentive program like a muscle that keeps business moving forward. When that muscle becomes overworked or strained, it calls for a fresh perspective on the framework driving your strategies and investments to ensure they keep supporting worthwhile returns. Partners need real reasons to push themselves further, drive stronger sales and keep leveling up their performance. But the real opportunity often lies in how your program is fundamentally structured and what it’s actually incentivizing.
So how do you keep growing revenue and increasing partners’ bottom-line impact without defaulting to bigger payouts as the only lever?
The Situation
How do you drive new growth in a long-standing incentive program?
A manufacturing leader had been setting the standard for years with a long-running, successful program. They kept their edge by rewarding and reinforcing their dealer sales reps (DSRs) for promoting their products and services over key competitors. Still, as with any legacy program, they needed budget-smart ways to keep driving incremental growth.
Their goals were clear: They wanted to rethink their current complex earning model to simplify how sales reps determine eligible incentives to avoid internal misalignment and confusion down the road, and they needed to drive more incremental revenue through partner sales, without simply increasing payout totals.
As a long-time partner, they turned to Maritz for guidance. While the program had it’s celebrated strengths and had been delivering measurable results for years, we saw this as a chance to give new life to the rule structures and optimize tiers to drive stronger sales performance. Using predictive analytics and proven behavioral and decision science principles, we analyzed and reconfigured the program’s rules to drive an even greater bottom-line impact.
The Solution
Proven Behavior Drivers and Refreshed Rule Structures
The program needed to maximize margins while containing spending. It wasn’t about just rewriting the rules either. Driving consistent performance would require elevating a key value proposition for partners: simplicity.
In place of the existing reality, where sales reps would navigate intricate SKU lists to determine eligible incentives, more comprehensive and motivating rule structures would make participation frictionless and even more rewarding.
This called for a systematic approach to redesigning the program’s rule structures by combining data, predictive modeling and behavioral science insights to transform the entire program framework.
Behavioral Science as a Motivational Blueprint
Key Behavioral Principles Applied:
- Endowed Progress Effect: A head start on goals gives sales reps an immediate sense of progress and sparks early momentum.
- Goal Gradient Theory: Effective tier structures will accelerate reps’ motivation to keep advancing each time they reach a new threshold.
- Loss Aversion: Annual tier resets create an urgency for reps to hold down their status and maintain earned benefits.
These become more than just foundational pieces for reshaping the program. In embedding these principles into the earning structure, training incentives and tier progression logic, they became powerful and cost-effective behavior catalysts, inspiring the business to reimagine their potential to drive lasting change.
Redesigning Rule Structures That Won’t Wear Out
Maritz’s decision sciences team saw a clear opportunity to elevate the program’s rules as an equal advantage for the reps and business. That meant the updated earning structures needed to strike a balance and raise the stakes enough to prompt more excitement and quicker responses from sellers, without raising the programs’ base payouts.
We modeled multiple different earning scenarios to project their potential impacts, bot to boost incremental behaviors and the program’s bottom line.
By weighing the predicted outcomes of each structure, the client zeroed in on several high-impact enhancements to make the program design even more effective for driving performance:
Targeting the Right Partners at the Right Times
A partner segmentation strategy was launched with adjusted tiers and rule sets to target specific partner types and sales roles. This made it possible to engage distinct seller groups and deploy the most effective behavior drivers when it mattered most.
Activating Stretch Behaviors
Tier thresholds were raised to encourage top performers to keep aiming higher. To boost that momentum, progressive bonus points were also added at each tier checkpoint, adding a motivational boost to keep sellers climbing.
Rewarding Early and Often
To further simplify the experience, SKU-based eligibility requirements were removed, so reps could earn on every sale. Incentivized rookie training was also rolled out, giving new reps early access to rewards and early traction in the program.
Increasing Urgency to Engage
Tier statuses were reset annually, pushing reps to stay engaged throughout the year to maintain their status and the benefits that come with it.
The Results
Accelerated Performance, Real Behavior Change and Measurable Revenue Growth
By reimagining the program’s rules and tier progression strategies through the lens of what really activates behavior, the program continues to see powerful results in real-time.
- Realized Revenue
$145M in incremental revenue through increased tier progressions - Sales Growth
+9.3 YOY sales growth following rule changes. - Faster Tier Advancement
15% increase in tier progressions YOY resulting from increased thresholds - Uptick in Top-Performers
11% more participants maintained their gold status after introducing annual tier resets - Reactivated Engagement
30% of reps who lost tier status in Year 1 regained it in Year 2
Make It Happen
When your incentive program design is built by data, predictive modeling and smart budgeting, you don’t have to guess if your rule structures and tiers will get sellers moving. Every effort, every incentive, every win becomes part of a bigger momentum. And your partners? They’ll feel it too.
By tapping into data and behavioral science to give new life to their rule structures and tiers, Maritz helped this business’s long-standing program transform into a powerful catalyst for driving revenue, changing behavior, gaining loyalty and unlocking measurable results.
Want to learn more about some of improvements we made to this programs?
Check out the full case study.
