Incentive compensation blog

Quiz of incentive compensation: test yourself before you go on holiday!

Written by Hervé de Riberolles | November 19, 2019

What better than a quiz of incentive compensation to address this summer period with confidence? Primeum wishes you a happy holiday.

 

 

1 / Is the following statement true or false?

The fixed salary pays for the job, experience and skills. Variable incentive compensation reflects individual or collective performance.

A/ true

B/ false

 

2 / How to avoid the fridge effect (the "fridge" technique consists in slowing down the sales process on a performance cycle and postponing these sales to the next cycle)?

A/ Use compensation curves that evolve continuously so as not to have stepped curves

B/ Set up a closing time bonus to encourage salespeople to finalize their action

C/ Sanctioning by setting higher goals for the next period

 

3 / Why encourage your salespeople to fill the CRM of the company after their customer appointments?

A/ So that you can check their productivity and better adjust their individual compensation

B/ So that they can rely on the valuable information needed to qualify their actions

 

4 / How to train your salespeople for the use of Linkedin will it allow you to improve the performance of your company?

A/ This system helps your salespeople to fully monitor the digital presence of their main competitors and thus gain productivity through the acquisition of key information on competitors

B/ This helps to show them that their company is concerned about improving their employability and contributes to improving the overall well-being of employees. Happy employees are more successful.

C/ This allows you to give the best tools to your sellers, by involving them in your social / digital strategies and by encouraging them to develop sales through social networks

 

5 / Variable pay is considered insufficiently motivating if it does not represent at least:

A/ Between 2 % and 7 % of fixed salary

B/ Between 8 % and 20 % of fixed salary

C/ Between 21 % and 41 % of fixed salary

D/ More than 50 % of fixed salary

 

6 / The principle "The more I sell, the more I earn" does it correspond to:

A/ Commissioning system

B/ Sales versus target bonus

C/ Ranking bonus

 

7 / How can incentive pay plan be a source of demotivation for your teams?

A / By setting up a scheme that is not adapted to the performance criteria

B / When management differentiates bonuses between employees

C / When the incentive compensation system relies on subjective criteria to evaluate the quality of work produced

 

8 / Why rely on software solutions when setting up an incentive compensation system?

A/ Because errors are more common on an excel file, errors can be very problematic when it comes to the incentive compensation of hundreds of employees.

B/ The software provides both flexibility and security in the transfer of data from servers in different departments of the company.

C/ Because a digital tool can communicate to all employees but it also helps everyone to simulate future incentive compensation.

 

9 / What is a sales versus target bonus rewarding performance effectively?

A/ A bonus that simultaneously takes into account qualitative and quantitative indicators: customer satisfaction, customer conversion rate, prospection of new customers

B/ A bonus based on the award of a target bonus to the objective achievement and a maximum bonus calibrated according to the dispersion of the achievements on past objectives

 

10 / When to introduce a collective part in a variable incentive compensation?

A/ When you want to stimulate collaborative work

B/ When you didn’t get accurately the individual achievements

C/ When you would like to introduce a qualitative part

 

 

ANSWERS TO THE QUIZ OF INCENTIVE COMPENSATION

1/ Answer : A

2/ Answer : A

Explanation : Find the 3 mistakes to avoid when defining an incentive scheme

3/ Answer : B

4/ Answer : C

5/ Answer : B

Explanation: The incentive compensation must represent at least one month of salary to be able to generate a real motivation and to modify behaviors durably. Moreover, according to an APEC study, it is particularly motivating from 1/5 of the gross salary on a commercial population

.6/ Answer : A

Explanation: Indexed to turnover excluding taxes, quantity sold, gross margin, etc., the commission is rarely capped.

7/ Answer : A and C

Explanation: Bonus differentiation of your employees is not necessarily a bad thing for their motivation. The prospect of being able to earn a lot has a strong impact on so do not hesitate to have scales making greater differences between a salesperson having achieved the performance and another in outperformance.

8/ Answer : A, B and C

9/ Answer : B

Explanation: A sales versus target bonus must be particularly well defined to be effective. Find all our tips in this article.

10/ Answer : A and B

Explanation: Find our article on collective bonus