How to Design Incentive Programs That Drive Collaboration & Customer Success (Using JTBD)

Implement a step-by-step approach grounded in JTBD to reward shared success and achieve strategic goals through aligned incentives.

Does this sound familiar? You've crafted what seems like a logical incentive program, aiming to boost performance. Yet, somehow, it fosters competition between your business units instead of collaboration. Your partners seem motivated, but not necessarily towards the strategic goals you share. Often, incentive programs end up creating silos, driving short-sighted behaviors, or simply failing to motivate the right actions across your entire business ecosystem. There's a better way.

Traditional reward systems often focus on easily measured, but ultimately lagging, indicators or unit-specific metrics. They frequently fail to capture the complex, cross-functional, and partner-inclusive contributions required to deliver real customer success – which should be the ultimate objective. This misalignment isn't just inefficient; it can actively undermine your strategic goals.

What if we reframed the problem using Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD)? Instead of just asking "What activities should we reward?", JTBD prompts us to ask, "What 'job' are our stakeholders (customers, business units, partners) trying to get done?" By understanding the desired outcomes and progress each stakeholder seeks, we can design incentive strategies that act as powerful enablers, helping everyone perform their essential 'jobs' better, in concert, towards achieving common goals.

In this post, we'll explore:

• Why traditional incentives often fall short.

• How to apply JTBD thinking to define the 'job' of your incentive strategy.

• Identifying the crucial desired outcomes for customers, business units, and partners.

• Designing an aligned strategy that rewards contribution to shared success.

• Key considerations for implementation.

The Core Problem: Why Traditional Incentives Often Fail

Many incentive structures are unintentionally flawed, leading to predictable problems:

• Focus on Activities, Not Outcomes: Rewarding tasks completed (e.g., number of calls made, features shipped) rather than progress towards a desired future state (e.g., customer achieving value, market share captured) encourages busywork over impact.

  An unnamed company in an eastern block country (before the wall came down) had a visitor who was there to evaluate some alarming trends in production quality. They made trucks. When he asked why the QA teams were all carrying ball peen hammers, the response was “to create defects”.

• Siloed Metrics: When a business unit is heavily incentivized on a KPI specific only to them (like maximizing their own revenue slice), they may make decisions detrimental to the overall customer experience or another unit's success. A classic example is sales closing deals that implementation teams aren't equipped to handle effectively, leading to downstream churn. (I have personal stories to tell!)

• Ignoring the Ecosystem: Customers rarely experience a company through a single touchpoint. Their success often depends on a seamless experience orchestrated across multiple internal teams and external partners. Incentives that fail to recognize and reward this joint contribution leave value on the table.

• Lagging Indicators: Basing rewards solely on past performance (e.g., last quarter's revenue) doesn't effectively steer future behavior towards strategic priorities. While important for evaluation, they aren't always the best drivers for change.

Applying JTBD: Defining the 'Job' of Your Incentive Strategy

Before designing rewards, we must define what we are 'hiring' the incentive strategy itself to accomplish for the company. This requires clarity on the overarching strategic goal. Examples of the 'job' of an incentive strategy could be:

• "Accelerate market adoption of our new integrated platform."

• "Increase customer lifetime value by ensuring seamless cross-product experiences."

• "Ensure consistently high customer satisfaction during onboarding, regardless of whether it's handled internally or by a partner."

• "Drive innovation by fostering cross-functional collaboration on new solutions."

Once the company's 'job' for the strategy is clear, we must understand the contributing 'jobs' of the key stakeholders:

• Business Units: What 'job' are they trying to get done in relation to the company's strategic job and the ultimate customer job? For example, a product unit's job might be to "Enable customers to achieve [specific outcome] faster with the new feature," while a sales unit's job is to "Identify and acquire customers who struggle most without our integrated platform."

• Partners: Similarly, what 'job' are partners trying to get done? This might be "Expand their service offerings by successfully implementing our platform for clients" or "Increase their market credibility by delivering measurable results using our joint solution."

Crucially, understanding these jobs involves identifying the desired outcomes – the metrics stakeholders use to measure success in getting their job done. These outcomes become the foundation for a more effective incentive structure.

Identifying Desired Outcomes Across Stakeholders

The process must start with the customer. What outcomes define success for them when they interact with your company and partners to get their job done? These are independent of your internal structure. Examples:

• "Minimize the time required to integrate the new software with existing systems."

• "Maximize the reliability and uptime of the service."

• "Easily access knowledgeable support regardless of which department or partner they contact first."

• "Clearly understand the total cost of ownership before committing."

Only after defining customer outcomes can we effectively identify the contributing outcomes for internal and external teams:

• Business Unit Outcomes: How do BUs measure their successful contribution to those customer outcomes? Examples:

  • "Increase the percentage of customers successfully utilizing cross-sold product features."

  • "Reduce the number of support escalations related to integration challenges."

  • "Improve the adoption rate of newly released platform capabilities."

  • "Increase the accuracy of sales forecasts for integrated solutions."

• Partner Outcomes: How do partners measure their successful contribution? Examples:

  • "Increase the conversion rate of leads for joint solutions."

  • "Improve CSAT scores specifically for partner-led implementation projects."

  • "Reduce the average time-to-value realized by referred customers."

  • "Increase the number of certified consultants proficient on the new platform."

Mapping these outcomes highlights the interdependencies and clarifies where collaboration is essential.

Designing the Aligned Incentive Strategy

With a clear map of customer, BU, and partner outcomes, we can design an incentive strategy that rewards progress towards shared goals. The core principle is: Reward the achievement of desired customer outcomes, enabled by measurable contributions from BUs and partners.

A potential structure includes these components:

1. Shared Goal Component: A significant portion of the incentive pool is tied directly to achieving key customer outcome metrics. This could be measured through overall solution adoption rates, Net Promoter Score (NPS) improvements across the journey, customer retention figures for integrated solutions, or specific customer success KPIs. Everyone shares responsibility for the ultimate customer success.

2. Contribution Component: Incentives are awarded based on achieving specific BU or Partner outcomes that have been demonstrably linked to the shared customer outcomes. Focus on leading indicators where possible (e.g., pipeline quality for joint deals, certification progress, successful completion of integration milestones) rather than solely lagging ones.

3. Collaboration Component: Explicitly reward specific collaborative behaviors known to drive better outcomes. This could include bonuses for successful joint account planning sessions, metrics tracking seamless customer handoffs between teams/partners, or rewards for identifying and implementing process improvements that benefit the entire ecosystem.

Elevating the Level of Abstraction: An Example

Consider the difference:

• Traditional: Reward a salesperson based solely on the value of licenses closed. Reward an implementation consultant based on billable hours. Reward a partner based on the number of referrals sent. Result: Potential for over-selling, rushed implementations, and low-quality referrals.

• JTBD Approach: Structure a shared incentive pool for the sales, implementation, and partner teams involved with a customer. Base a significant portion of the reward on the customer achieving a specific, measurable outcome (e.g., "Reduce processing time by 30% within 90 days of go-live using the integrated solution"). Contribution components might reward the sales team for pipeline quality related to this outcome, the implementation team for meeting project milestones tied to value realization, and the partner for post-implementation adoption support. Result: Focus shifts from siloed activities to collective responsibility for tangible customer success.

This shift requires abstracting away from individual tasks to focus on the higher-context job – delivering customer value. In the future, this might even simplify the types of roles needed, as the focus moves towards orchestrating customer success rather than managing fragmented functional tasks.

Implementation Considerations

Shifting to a JTBD-driven incentive model requires careful planning:

• Measurement: Can you reliably track the shared customer outcomes and the key contributing BU/Partner metrics? This often requires investment in shared data infrastructure and reporting dashboards accessible across the ecosystem. Transparency is key.

• Communication: The 'why' behind the change is as important as the 'how'. Clearly articulate the customer-centric rationale (based on JTBD) and the mechanics of the new structure to all stakeholders. Ensure everyone understands how their contributions fit into the bigger picture.

• Phased Rollout: Implementing a radical change across the board can be risky. Consider piloting the new approach with a specific strategic initiative, product line, or a select group of partners first. Learn and refine before scaling.

• Flexibility & Iteration: No system is perfect from day one. Build in regular review cycles (e.g., quarterly) to assess the strategy's effectiveness, gather feedback from participants, and make necessary adjustments based on real-world results.

Conclusion: Incentivizing What Matters

Moving away from traditional, often siloed, incentive structures towards an approach grounded in Jobs-to-be-Done isn't just a tweak – it's a strategic shift. By focusing first on the 'job' the customer is trying to get done, and then aligning business unit and partner motivations around enabling that success, you create a powerful engine for collaboration and shared achievement.

This requires a commitment to understanding customer needs deeply, fostering transparency across your ecosystem, and rewarding the collective behaviors that genuinely drive value. It’s about investing in alignment to achieve strategic goals, rather than simply managing the costs of individual motivation.

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What are the biggest challenges you face with incentive alignment in your organization or partner network? Share your experiences and thoughts in the comments below – let's learn from each other!

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