Incentives for non-sales roles that reward real impact

Designing incentives for non-sales roles is where many compensation strategies fall apart. 

The logic that works for sales, such as clear ownership, direct outcomes, and short feedback loops rarely applies cleanly to product, engineering, operations, finance, or leadership roles.

Yet many companies try anyway. They bolt individual targets onto complex, interdependent work and hope for the best. The result is predictable: gaming, distraction, and a growing sense that incentives are more hassle than help.

This article tackles the tough question of how to design variable compensation for roles where impact is shared. 

Why individual targets often fail outside sales

Sales roles lend themselves to individual incentives because ownership is usually clear. 

One person owns a deal, and the outcome happens within a defined timeframe. The link between action and result is visible.

Most non-sales roles don’t look like that.

Product managers depend on engineering, design, and leadership decisions. Engineers depend on product clarity and technical context. 

Operations teams depend on forecasting accuracy and upstream behaviour. Leaders depend on everyone.

When you try to force individual targets into that environment, a few things tend to happen:

• People optimise their slice of the problem, not the whole system
• Work shifts toward what’s measurable, not what’s important
• Collaboration quietly erodes as incentives pull people apart

Behavioural research consistently shows that financial incentives are least effective, and most distortionary, when tasks are complex, collaborative, or require judgement rather than repetition.

That doesn’t mean non-sales roles shouldn’t be rewarded for impact. It means impact needs to be defined at the right level.

The danger of false precision

One of the most common mistakes in non-sales incentives is false precision: assigning numbers to outcomes that can’t meaningfully be reduced to numbers.

You see this in KPIs such as story points delivered as a stand-in for engineering impact, features shipped as a measure of product success, or tickets closed as a proxy for operational effectiveness.

These metrics are easy to track and easy to pay against, but they’re also easy to game.

False precision pulls attention away from harder work that doesn’t fit neatly into a metric, and creates the illusion of objectivity, which makes bad incentives harder to challenge.

A useful rule of thumb is this: if people have to ask how to optimise the metric, rather than how to improve the outcome, the incentive is already misaligned.

Team-based vs company-wide incentives

When individual incentives fail, the instinctive alternative is team-based or company-wide rewards. These can work, but only when designed with care.

Team-based incentives are effective when:

• Outcomes genuinely depend on cross-functional effort
• Teams have autonomy over how work gets done
• Success or failure is visible within the team

They reinforce collaboration and shared accountability, but they require trust. If team boundaries are unclear or teams lack real ownership, team-based incentives feel arbitrary.

Company-wide incentives such as profit share or broad bonus pools work best when:

• The business has a clear, shared definition of success
• Individual contributions are hard to isolate fairly
• Leadership wants to reinforce ownership over optimisation

According to PwC’s Global Incentives Survey, variable pay makes up a far smaller proportion of total compensation for non-sales roles precisely because individual impact is harder to isolate without distortion.

That’s not a weakness, but a recognition of reality.

Where share schemes fit in

Shares are often described as the ultimate non-sales incentive. 

Share schemes are most effective when:

• Outcomes play out over years, not quarters
• Roles evolve as the company grows
• You want people to care about enterprise value, not local optimisation

Vestd’s own survey data shows that 95% of companies using share schemes found them effective for retention, highlighting equity’s strength as a long-term alignment tool rather than a short-term motivator. 

Designing incentives that reinforce ownership and accountability

The best non-sales incentive schemes share a few common traits.

They operate at the right level, team or company, not forced individual attribution. They favour clarity over precision, and reinforce ownership rather than micromanagement.

Practically, that means:

• Fewer metrics, clearly tied to outcomes that matter
• Longer time horizons where value accrues slowly
• Transparency about how rewards are determined
• Consistency over cleverness

Above all, they make it easier for people to do the right thing without constantly checking the incentive rules.

When incentives fail in non-sales roles, it’s usually because they ask people to choose between acting responsibly and optimising their pay.

Summary

Incentivising non-sales roles is hard because the work itself is hard to reduce. There is no formula that will cleanly map individual effort to business outcome.

When incentives reinforce ownership, accountability, and long-term value creation, they become quiet enablers rather than constant distractions. When they chase false precision, they add friction where none is needed.

That’s the real test of a good incentive scheme: not whether it’s clever, but whether people forget about it and get on with the work.

Build a more aligned, motivated team with Vestd.
From share schemes to smarter role design, we help founders and leaders create companies where people do their best work.

Book a call with Vestd