The destination gets three meetings. The bar gets a number somebody remembered from last year — even though it is the only part of the program that changes what anyone does.
Peak Performance · Incentive Travel Group LLC
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The qualification bar is the mechanism. Everything else is the reward attached to it. Set it wrong and you still pay for the trip — you simply do not get the behaviour you were buying.
What follows is how we think about setting one: who the bar is actually for, what proportion should clear it, why pure attainment is usually the wrong measure, and how to test a number before it becomes a promise you cannot withdraw.
An incentive program returns whatever the incremental effort is worth, minus what it cost. The destination determines how much people want the reward. The bar determines how many of them believe it is worth chasing. Only the second one is a lever you control precisely.
That asymmetry is not reflected in how the decisions get made. Destination selection gets a shortlist, a site inspection and a steering meeting. The bar gets set in twenty minutes, usually by carrying forward last year’s number against this year’s quotas — which are almost never comparable.
Flip the weighting. If you only have time to get one of the two right, get the bar right and take the group somewhere ordinary.
Any field splits into three groups the moment a bar is published.
The locks. Your top performers, who will qualify whatever the number is. Usually three to five percent of the team. For them the trip is a retention tool, not a motivator — valuable, but it is not buying you incremental revenue.
The out-of-reach. People who work out early that they cannot get there. They disengage from the program entirely, and every one of them is budget you are spending on communications nobody reads.
The movable middle. Everyone for whom the honest answer is “maybe, if I push.” This is the only group whose behaviour your program can change, and every dollar of incremental revenue comes from it.
So the job is not to find a number that identifies your best people. Your CRM already does that. The job is to find the number that makes the movable middle as large as it can be.
Bruce Rickert · Peak Performance
Every question below is really a version of that one.
The working convention is eight to fifteen percent of the eligible field, and most programs land close to ten. That range is not arbitrary — it is roughly where a bar is generous enough that people believe it and tight enough that it stays a distinction.
Below about five percent, the middle stops believing and you have bought a reward for people who were going to perform anyway. Above about twenty, the award stops reading as an achievement and starts reading as a benefit, and the per-head budget gets squeezed until the trip itself is no longer worth chasing.
Four things should move your number inside that range:
That last point is the one most often missed. A bar that lets thirty extra people qualify does not expand the budget — it divides the same budget across more travellers, and everyone gets a lesser trip.
The people who decide whether to chase are not the ones on the stage. They are the ones watching from the middle of the leaderboard.
“One hundred percent of quota” is the most common bar in the industry and one of the least fair, because it assumes quotas are comparable across territories, tenures and product mixes. They rarely are.
A pure attainment bar quietly rewards whoever negotiated the softest number, and your best reps know it. A rep in a mature patch at 104% may have done far less than one at 92% in a territory that was built from nothing this year. Publish a bar that cannot see the difference and you teach the field that the sales planning conversation matters more than the selling.
The usual fixes: blend attainment with year-over-year growth; run a points system that weights new logos, expansion and strategic products differently; or rank the field rather than setting an absolute threshold.
Each has a cost. A threshold bar is motivating precisely because your fate is in your own hands — you are competing against a number, not against the person at the next desk. A rank-based bar is fairer and more zero-sum, which changes the internal culture in ways some teams handle well and others do not. Plenty of programs split the difference: clear a threshold and finish in the top tier. Just know which trade you are making, and make separate provision for new hires and new territories rather than pretending a ramp does not exist.
A well-set bar still fails if the machinery around it is wrong. Publish it before the measurement period begins, in full, including the tie-breaks and the edge cases. Put a leaderboard in front of the field on a fixed cadence people can rely on. Offer more than one path where roles genuinely differ, so the overlay specialist and the territory rep are not competing on a measure that only fits one of them.
And build a tier below the winners — a named, recognised group who came close. Near-misses are next year’s most motivated people if you acknowledge them, and next year’s most cynical if you do not.
Where most bars land
When the middle decides whether to chase
Acceptable mid-period changes
The first two are planning conventions rather than measured findings — useful defaults, not laws. The third one is not a convention. It is the rule.
Every year, somewhere, a company discovers in month six that far more people are on track than it budgeted for, and raises the bar to bring the number down. It saves money once. It costs the program permanently — because from that point on, every published target is provisional, and the movable middle has learned that pushing does not reliably pay. If you set the bar too low, honour it, pay for the bigger group, and fix the number next year. That is the cheaper mistake by a wide margin.
A proposed bar can be checked in an afternoon, and almost nobody does it:
A bar people chase is not a generous bar or a tough one. It is a believable one — published early, left alone, and set at the number that puts the largest possible group in genuine reach of it.
Bruce has designed sales incentive and channel reward programs for technology, manufacturing and energy clients since 2003, including multi-tier referral structures and President’s Club trips across four continents.
