How to Implement a Marketing Incentive Plan with Your Team

Incentives are a powerful tool for getting everyone in your practice onboard with a marketing program. Not only do rewards improve team morale, but when set up properly, they can foster collaboration, increase motivation and ultimately skyrocket productivity and profitability. When your team is on the same page, working together toward a shared goal, there is no limit to what your practice can accomplish. Not sure where to start? Here’s how to set up and implement a marketing incentive plan, step by step.

Step 1: Establish your goal. You can’t incentivize your employees if you don’t have a clear and specific picture of what you want them to achieve. By way of example, we’ll use a goal of 20% to 25% increase in revenue, which is ambitious but not unreachable.

Step 2: Determine the time frame within which you’d like to accomplish the desired end result. Make sure the time frame you set is sufficient and realistic, but not too long. For the example goal above, 6 months is a fair and doable number. Anything shorter might result in failure, and anything longer could cause employee motivation to stall.

Step 3: Figure out what service you’d like to promote and what the net revenue is for that service. For instance, let’s say you decide you want your staff to push more dental exams. For most practices, this service produces a net revenue of around 50% of the gross gain.

Step 4: Calculate how much revenue must be generated during the promotional period in order to reach your goal. For instance, if you determine that dental exams produced $100k over the previous 6 months and your goal is to increase revenue by 20%, you’ll need to generate an additional $20k from dental exams during the incentive period in order for the plan to be successful.

Step 5: Determine the percentage you’d like to give back to your team for their efforts should the goal be reached. For instance, let’s say you decide to use 50% – or $10,000 – of your revenue increase to reward your employees. This can be in the form of cash bonuses, a trip, continuing education opportunities – the choice is yours. You’ll just need to figure out how much you’ll be earmarking for whatever incentive you decide on.

Step 6: Create and post a chart to track the team’s progress throughout the promotional period. Generate a little bit of friendly competition by creating a leader board to showcase which team member is producing the highest number of dental exams. You may also want to set smaller, incremental goals throughout the incentive period to keep everyone on track and working toward the overarching goal.

By developing and implementing an employee incentive program, not only will you motivate your team to work harder and produce better results, but you’ll foster a more positive, productive culture at the same time. Happier employees mean more satisfied clients and repeat business, which means more long-term success for your practice. With this type of set up, everybody wins!