My only experience with an incentive program was at my last job where I sold house paint.

When they started the program, it didn't have strict guidelines, just based on 'overall' sales. When it worked too well, they started breaking it down and being more specific on what needed to be sold to get the incentive. Then they changed what type of customer you could get incentive off of.

And so forth and so on.

Basically, after two years, with the constant changes making it more difficult (if not impossible) to reach incentive, everyone pretty much gave up trying.

Other big issue for us was that we couldn't price match, and any discounts had to go thru upper management which were always too busy to take phone calls. How do you justify to a customer why they should spend more (a LOT more) for a product when our competitor down the street sells the same thing for cheaper?