Designing an Incentive Plan for Media Distribution Teams: Any Suggestions?

Hi all,

I work in a media and entertainment company and want to design an attractive incentive plan for the distribution team. The earnings are basically divided into 3 broad categories: revenue (month-on-month basis from existing clients), collection (from existing clients), and new activation (capturing new clients). It would be a great help to get suggestions from experienced people like all of you.

Thanks and regards,
Mayank

How about giving incentives based on their overtime work if they have done overtime work.

By R.M. Manoj

How about making incentives proportionate more towards capturing new clients and less towards existing clients.

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How about making incentives proportionate more towards capturing new clients and less towards existing clients.

Incentive Plan Suggestions

Your effort is laudable. However, you haven't mentioned whether there's any plan as of now or if you wish to introduce it newly. If a plan is already in vogue, please provide the details.

Approach to Incentive Design

Coming to your request for suggestions, there could be different ways of looking at it. Realistically, each of the categories should cater to one-third of the total incentive amount. However, you could also have three different incentive slabs, one for each of the three categories you mentioned.

How you design the plan depends on what priorities the company has vis-a-vis the categories— which one is first, second, and third. If getting new clients is priority number one, then the incentives for that activity could be higher than the other two. And so it goes.

Prioritization and Consistency

However, the prioritizing needs to be done very carefully. Just because the company may be having some cash-flow issues now, I suggest not bringing collections to the top of the list. Once the cash flow problem subsides, then you will have a problem justifying it to be at the top.

Maintain some level of consistency in terms of timelines and timeframes. Usually, any incentive model shouldn't be changed for at least one year, announced at the beginning of the year.

Special Assignments

If there's any very specific high-value or high-visibility order (could be termed as special assignments in the plan), that should be dealt with separately, instead of combining it with the regular plan.

Hope this helps.

All the best.

Regards,
TS