In 2024 alone, QuotaPath customers paid out $7.3M in SPIFs and accelerators. But how much of that actually changed rep behavior versus paying for results that would have happened anyway?
While Sales Performance Incentive Funds (SPIFs) can be powerful levers, companies often fail to measure the incrementality of SPIFs, the actual additional lift they create. Without that clarity, organizations risk shrinking margins by funding incentive compensation that rewards outcomes that might have occurred without the SPIF.
That raises a central question: Are SPIFs driving true additional lift, or are they just giveaways? Understanding this distinction is crucial for measuring SPIF ROI and determining whether these short-term incentives are worthwhile investments.
In this blog, we’ll bring clarity to the issue.
We’ll define what SPIFs are, explain what “incrementality” means in a sales incentive context, and show why it matters for ROI. We’ll also share real examples and data from QuotaPath’s SPIF Report, along with best practices for testing and proving SPIF impact.
The SPIF Report
Curious how top revenue teams use SPIFs and accelerators to align with key business goals and drive measureable results? Our latest report below dives in.
View ReportWhat Are SPIFs?
A Sales Performance Incentive Fund, or SPIF, is defined as a short-term, tactical incentive used to drive immediate sales behaviors or outcomes. Unlike long-term compensation structures, SPIFs are designed to create urgency and direct attention toward specific business priorities such as closing deals faster, securing multi-year contracts, or acquiring new customers.
SPIFs can take many forms, but the most common structures for incentive compensation include:
- Cash bonuses: Direct payments that reward reps for achieving a specific goal, such as closing a certain number of deals or hitting a quarterly milestone.
- Gift cards: Non-cash rewards that offer quick recognition and motivate reps with immediate, tangible value.
- Extra commissions: A temporary boost to commission rates for qualifying deals. Our report revealed that 95% of SPIFs in 2024 were structured this way, underscoring their popularity as a straightforward and scalable method for incentivizing performance.
What Does “Incrementality” Mean in Business?
Incrementality in business refers to the net-new results generated by a program. Incrementality of SPIFs reveals whether the program actually caused additional sales activity or if the results would have happened naturally.
The concept is best understood through control-versus-test logic. To measure incrementality, ask: What changed only because the SPIF existed? By comparing sales performance with and without the incentive, or against historical baselines, you can distinguish between natural growth and SPIF-driven gains.
This leads to two key evaluation questions:
Did the SPIF cause reps to sell more?
Or would they have sold anyway?
Answering these questions determines whether a SPIF had a measurable sales incentives impact or simply rewarded activity that would have naturally occurred.
Employees who receive recognition are 20 times as likely to be engaged.
From: Workhuman-Gallup Research
Why Incrementality Matters for SPIFs
A SPIF’s incrementality is an indicator of the sales incentive effectiveness for achieving the intended goal. For instance, an incremental SPIF equals true extra revenue plus changed behavior. SPIFs are designed to motivate, recognize, and reward specific behaviors or achievements.
Employees who receive recognition are 20 times as likely to be engaged. When done right, SPIFs increase engagement, boosting the sales culture connectedness. Improving cultural connectedness improves seller performance by 24% and retention by 30%, according to Gartner.
A non-incremental SPIF, on the other hand, equals just giving away money and shrinking margins. These ineffective SPIFs have unintended consequences like increased costs by rewarding untested outcomes from behaviors like falsifying data, creating fake customers, or sandbagging. This is why it’s essential to measure comp plan ROI to determine if the SPIF is worth the cost.
Example of SPIF Incrementality
A manufacturing company implemented a SPIF that yielded a noticeable increase in product sales. At first glance, the results looked promising: sales increased once the incentive took effect, and leadership attributed the program with creating a meaningful lift. But a closer look at the numbers tells a different story.
- Without SPIF → 100 units sold.
- With SPIF → 130 units sold.
- Incrementality = 30 units.
- If natural growth would have been 128 anyway → true incrementality = 2 units.
This example shows how failing to test incrementality can lead to overstating the sales incentives’ impact. Initially, it appears that the SPIF resulted in the sale of 30 additional units. However, after accounting for natural growth, the true incrementality was found to be only two units.
Insights From QuotaPath’s 2025 SPIF Report
Beyond theory, the numbers tell an important story. QuotaPath’s 2025 SPIF Report provides helpful data on how organizations are structuring and using SPIFs in their sales compensation plans to drive results.
- $7.3M in SPIFs & accelerators paid out in 2024.
- 95% structured as commissions vs. flat bonuses.
- Popular SPIFs
- Multi-year accelerators (15% of plans, drove 25% of revenue)
- Logo milestones (new customer focus)
- Fast starts (early pipeline progress)
- Consistency bonuses (steady performance)
It’s important to remember that SPIFs are not “fixes” for broken compensation plans. They are tactical levers to align seller behaviors with GTM strategy and key business objectives.
Design, track, and manage variable incentives with QuotaPath. Give your RevOps, finance, and sales teams transparency into sales compensation.
Talk to SalesHow to Measure the Incrementality of a SPIF
Measuring incrementality requires disciplined testing and analysis. Gartner reports that nearly 88% of organizations that implement SPIFFs with well-defined goals and robust tracking systems witness a 15% or higher lift in short-term sales performance. The key is putting the right structure and evaluation methods in place.
Best practices
According to QuotaPath’s 2025 SPIF Report, these tips will help you create effective SPIFs as you build your sales incentive program:
- Keep SPIFs easy to understand.
- Tie to desired behaviors (multi-year contracts, new logos).
- Implement with time-bound urgency (Q$ fast starts, seasonal pushes).
Evaluation methods
It’s essential to test the incrementality of SPIFs. Use the following methods to assess their sales incentive effectiveness:
- Compare against historical baseline sales.
- Factor in seasonality & demand.
- Run A/B style tests (regions/teams with vs. without SPIF).
Should You Run SPIFs? Key Takeaways
SPIFs are powerful tools for shaping behavior and driving short-term results. However, SPIFs are expensive if they’re not incremental. Use an incrementality analysis to decide, by asking:
- Are you incentivizing net new results?
- Or just rewarding what would have happened anyway?
The answer tells you whether a SPIF drives actual value or is a giveaway.
With QuotaPath, leaders can test, track, and prove SPIF ROI before scaling, while offloading work from your top performers by automating non-sales-related tasks, like commissions. In fact, McKinsey found that automation and AI free up approximately 20 percent of a sales team’s capacity, enabling top performers to outpace their peers in sales productivity.
Test, manage, and track SPIFs with QuotaPath. Request a demo to see exactly how much lift your incentives are creating.
