# We Asked Six Enablement Leaders to Defend Their SPIFF Programs. Two Could.

> A composite Q&A drawn from real client conversations, built around the one question most SPIFF budgets never survive: what behavior, specifically, is this bounty supposed to change?

By Greg McCallum, founder of PeerLab. Published 2026-01-13 in Comp & Quota. Source: https://www.peerlab.ai/blog/six-enablement-leaders-defend-spiff-programs/

Six enablement leaders, one question, asked the same way every time: what specific behaviour is this SPIFF paying for, and how would you know it worked? Not a hard question. Not an ambush. It's the first thing I ask about any accelerator programme I'm asked to audit, because it's the fastest way to find out whether a SPIFF was built against a real gap or copied out of a competitor's kickoff deck with the numbers changed. Four of the six couldn't answer it without contradicting themselves inside thirty seconds. Two could, immediately, without hedging. What follows is a composite of those six conversations, lightly disguised, because the pattern matters more than the names.

## The four that didn't survive the question

**Leader 1: VP Enablement, ~250-rep fintech.**
Q: What behaviour is the £500 new-logo SPIFF paying for?
A: New logos. We want more new logos this quarter.
Q: Isn't that just quota? New logos are already the comp plan's job.
A: [pause] I suppose it's meant to be extra push in Q4.
*Verdict: didn't survive. The SPIFF duplicates the base comp plan's own incentive with no distinct behaviour attached to it.*

**Leader 2: Director of Sales Enablement, ~80-rep martech scale-up.**
Q: What behaviour is the demo-booked SPIFF paying for?
A: Booking more demos.
Q: Booking demos with whom? Any demo, or demos that convert?
A: Any demo booked counts.
*Verdict: didn't survive. Rewards volume of an activity with no quality gate, which in this case produced a spike in demo no-shows the quarter it launched.*

**Leader 3: Head of Enablement, ~150-rep cybersecurity vendor.**
Q: What's the multi-threading SPIFF paying for?
A: Getting reps to bring in more stakeholders on enterprise deals.
Q: How many stakeholders, on which deals, and how will you measure that it changed?
A: We don't currently track stakeholder count in the CRM.
*Verdict: didn't survive. Correct instinct, no measurement infrastructure to know if the behaviour actually happened.*

**Leader 4: VP Revenue Enablement, ~400-rep enterprise software company.**
Q: What behaviour does this SPIFF exist to change?
A: Honestly, our biggest competitor ran something similar at their SKO last year and their reps loved it.
*Verdict: didn't survive, immediately, on the second sentence.*

## The two that did

**Leader 5: Head of Enablement, ~120-rep vertical SaaS company.**
Q: What behaviour is this SPIFF paying for?
A: Multi-year contract attach on renewals. A training-needs assessment flagged that reps default to one-year terms even when the discount maths favours multi-year for both sides: it's a negotiation-skill gap, not a pricing gap. We measured attach rate for the eight weeks before launch: 14%. The SPIFF pays out on attach above 30%, and we're re-measuring at the same eight-week cadence afterwards.
*Verdict: survived. Named skill gap, pre-launch baseline, a specific and falsifiable success threshold.*

**Leader 6: Director of Enablement, ~60-rep industrial B2B distributor.**
Q: What behaviour is this SPIFF paying for?
A: Discovery calls that actually surface a budget-holder's name before stage 2. We were losing deals late because reps were qualifying against a champion, not an economic buyer. Baseline was 22% of stage-2 deals with an identified EB. Targeting 45% inside the quarter, tracked weekly, and it sunsets the day we hit it three quarters running.
*Verdict: survived. Same shape as Leader 5: a named competency gap, a number before the programme started, and a defined end condition.*

## What separates two from four

| Failure pattern | How common in the sample | Why it collapses |
|---|---|---|
| Rewards an outcome the base comp plan already rewards | Most common | The SPIFF adds no new behaviour, just a second payout for the same one: expensive redundancy dressed as urgency |
| Rewards volume with no quality gate | Second most common | Reps optimise for the metric exactly as written, producing more of the activity and no more of the result it was meant to proxy for |
| Right instinct, no baseline or tracking | Third | Nobody can say afterwards whether it worked, because nobody measured the "before": the programme becomes unfalsifiable by design, which is indistinguishable from theatre after the fact |
| Copied from a competitor's kickoff deck | Least common outright, most damning when it appears | There was never a gap being closed: the programme exists because someone liked how it looked on a slide, not because a rep behaviour needed to change |

The two that survived share a structure, not a topic: the specific skill or activity being paid for happened to differ, negotiation-adjacent term structuring versus discovery-stage qualification, but both had a competency gap named from an actual training-needs assessment, a real number measured before the money went out, and a target that would prove the SPIFF wrong if it wasn't hit.

## The three-question funding gate

Before the next SPIFF gets budget signed off, run it through these, in this order:

1. **Does the base comp plan already pay for this?** If yes, you're not incentivising new behaviour, you're doubling a payout. Stop here.
2. **What was the baseline, measured before launch, and how will you re-measure it?** If there's no baseline, you're funding a programme you can never actually evaluate, you'll only ever have anecdotes about whether it "felt" like it worked.
3. **What's the specific rep behaviour, not the business outcome, this is meant to change?** "More revenue" and "more new logos" are outcomes the comp plan already owns. "Reps ask for the budget-holder's name before stage 2" is a behaviour you can coach, measure, and eventually retire the SPIFF for, because reps do it without being paid extra to.

A [Sales Training Needs Assessment Survey](https://www.peerlab.ai/library/sales-training-needs-assessment-survey/) is the right starting point if you don't already have a named gap sitting behind the programme you're about to fund, and a [Sales Kickoff Budget & ROI Calculator](https://www.peerlab.ai/library/sales-kickoff-budget-roi-calculator/) is worth running before the next SKO deck gets built around whatever last year's numbers were, rather than around this year's actual gaps. Once a SPIFF is live, [Manager Coaching Cadence Checklist](https://www.peerlab.ai/library/manager-coaching-cadence-checklist/) is the thing that decides whether the behaviour it's paying for actually gets reinforced in 1:1s, or just quietly measured from a distance until the budget cycle ends.

Two out of six isn't a damning ratio on its own. It's damning that the other four were confident they'd pass, right up until the second question.