When your sales team operates out of a single office, with everyone on an equal competitive footing, setting the achievement levels for incentive contests is not particularly challenging. But expand that challenge into multiple offices across the country, or even hundreds of offices in dozens of divisions operating worldwide, selling a vast array of products and services to a global customer base, and it’s enough to give any incentive program manager an Excedrin headache.

This was precisely the test recently faced by the sales compensation team leaders at telecommunications giant Motorola. Erin Smith, the company’s global practice leader of sales rewards, penned an article for the August issue of Talent Management Magazine, describing Motorola’s year-long effort to revamp the sales organization, define consistent policies and practices across divisions, and create competitive sales compensation and rewards for the entire corporation. As more salespeople transferred between sales teams, Smith says, it became increasingly apparent that different regions and divisions had their own approaches to rewarding sales activity.

Understanding the key role played by sales compensation in driving corporate success, Motorola’s CEO called for the formation of a global steering committee to sponsor an overhaul of the company’s sales rewards approach.

Consisting of handpicked executive level leaders in sales, finance, and HR who represented the diverse needs of the business, the committee had to address the following specific shortcomings of the existing system:

• No systematic way to identify sales incentive employees in like roles
• Proliferation of job titles and inconsistent grading
• Below-market sales incentive plan leverage
• Inconsistent sales incentive design strategies for thresholds, upside, caps
• Inconsistent salary practices when moving to/from sales incentive roles
• Inconsistent practices to reward top achievers at year-end
• Highly decentralized, manual process for sales incentive administration

The vision driving the committee’s work was to create a new program in which every salesperson would have a clear understanding of his or her role, as well as the roles of the company’s other salespeople.

The process began with the painstaking collection of market data, first from the U.S., and then from the more than 60 markets where Motorola operates. Not surprisingly, information about pay grade structures, job hierarchies, and job descriptions in some of the more remote countries or smaller offices was not always readily available.

Filling in the gaps where necessary with data from similar offices in other countries, the committee created job descriptions and job families representative of each business and region’s specific needs. These breakdowns represented the starting point for creating comparisons in sales responsibilities across markets, divisions, and countries.

As a result of several months of collaboration, investigation, and analysis, the committee created a new set of grades based on the total target cash levels of the salespeople rather than on their salary levels. This shift helped create an internal equity of compensation for sales employees in different regions or countries, something that had been absent when grade levels depended exclusively on salary/incentive mix, which varied widely across the company.

Based on the same research, the committee determined that Motorola also needed to replace the patchwork of existing reward trips spread across different regions and divisions with a single incentive trip for top sales achievers. The first trip took place in the same year the committee’s other recommendations were implemented, giving the company’s upper level executives the opportunity to personally express their appreciation to the company’s top sales achievers.

Smith says that this sales organizational revamp has paid dividends not only for the company, but also for the sales reps and managers who have more clearly defined roles within Motorola’s global sales infrastructure. "Today, the global hierarchy and pay grade structure that laid the foundation for important work in sales rewards continues to support talent mobility and ensure competitive and equitable pay," she says. "Sales representatives and their managers have a clear understanding of their career paths at Motorola and the behaviors and performance levels that define success."