The first step for any company is to get a clear understanding of its own performance curve. Ideally, this would be done through sophisticated econometric methods, but an approximation can be obtained as follows: If you simply calculate each salesperson's performance against sales target and then create a histogram of those data, your'll have rough understanding of whether your company's curve is normal (mostly core performers, with about equal numbers of laggards and stars), laggard-heavy, or star-heavy. The shape of the curve will suggest which incentives will give your the most leverage.(If your have a disproportionate number of laggards, you'll want to focus first on pace-setting bonuser and natural social pressure, for example.)