Incentives
Unifying Incentives to Drive Strategic Growth Across Diverse Business Units
Industry
Electrical Equipment Manufacturing
Company Size
1K-5K Employees
The Results
A scalable incentive plan framework aligned to strategy, driving profitable growth, improving fairness and transparency, maximizing ROI on compensation spend, and strengthening sales culture and collaboration.
Client Background
Our client is a leading provider of critical infrastructure equipment and services across multiple business units. Following a change in ownership and leadership, the organization sought to realign its Sales Incentive Plan (SIP), addressing inconsistent metrics, unclear crediting rules, and fragmented data across multiple systems to ensure accurate, timely, and strategy-aligned incentive management.
Challenges
Before engaging livingHR, the organization faced several challenges in its sales incentive approach:
- Lack of alignment between existing incentive plans and the company’s new growth strategy.
- Multiple systems and reporting structures (Oracle, ADP, Salesforce) created complexity in tracking performance and payouts.
- Incentive plans varied by unit (Electrical, RIG-A-LITE, WSI), leading to inconsistent measures of success.
- Limited governance around “whale projects” or windfalls, and no formal crediting rules for cross-selling.
- Sales support roles were misaligned with incentive eligibility, creating equity and motivation issues.
Success Metrics
Through a comprehensive assessment and design process, livingHR delivered a new incentive plan framework aligned to the organization’s business strategy:
- Alignment to strategy: Defined clear metrics tied to profitable growth, cross-selling, and expansion into new markets (e.g., lithium-based storage, data centers, non–oil & gas industries).
- Improved fairness and transparency: Standardized crediting rules and governance for large deals, ensuring clarity and reducing disputes.
- Better ROI on compensation spend: Modeled payout curves and accelerators to balance upside potential with financial discipline.
- Enablement of sales culture: Differentiated top vs. low performers while reinforcing customer advocacy and collaboration across business units.
- Scalable process: Established a repeatable approach for quota setting, metric validation, and plan governance to ensure sustainability.
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