Seeking the Holy Grail: creating an incentive plan that works.

• Author: Segarra, Tracey

"People often say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does bathing--that's why we recommend it daily. --Zig Zigler

Showing management a clear return on its business development dollars is the Holy Grail of marketing departments. Many items in our budgets (branding and advertising, anyone?) just don't lend themselves to clear cause-and-effect relationships.

But what if there was a way for the marketing department to help motivate nearly everyone below partner to:

* Network on a regular basis;

* Get involved with industry and professional groups;

* Brainstorm on new and better ways to serve clients;

* Pore over industry magazines to find articles of interest to clients and the firm;

* Come up with new office efficiencies; and

* Bring in new business from friends, relatives and current clients.

And what if all of this activity could be effortlessly recorded and tracked--by individual, date and activity category and churned out in monthly reports for management to review, That would make your managing partner sit up and take notice, right?

Well that's exactly what accounting firms like mine are doing through carefully constructed employee incentive programs. And they would work just as well at law firms, too. Right nosy, we are in the middle of an 11-month incentive program that is blowing away all of our expectations.

Here's how we did it, and hose you can, too.

Buy-In Is Key

For an incentive program to work, you've first got to lay out your goals and vision and sell the concept to every level of the firm-starting with the top. To sell the idea to my managing partner (and to get him to fund it at a level that would really motivate the staff), I gathered evidence of the firm's growing commitment to employee development and retention, such as the hiring of a business coach and the twice-yearly series of "Citrin Cooperman University" classes that the firm provides staff to teach them non-technical skills.

I also pointed out that the professional staff was regularly encouraged to attend networking events and take clients and referral sources out to lunch. Problem was, no one was tracking the results of these initiatives on either a firm-wide or individual basis. An incentive program, I argued, would tie all of these efforts together, and give the staff a chance to practice what they were learning-and the motivation to do so on a daily basis.

Once the MP was on board, I enlisted a few marketing-minded partners to help Bran a diversified...