Quarterly quotas made our year lumpier, not smoother

A lesson from a change I recommended and now partly regret. Building materials distributor in Germany, 130 field sellers. We moved from an annual quota with monthly commission to four discrete quarterly quotas with quarterly bonuses, on the theory that shorter periods keep people focused.

What happened: orders bunched in the last two weeks of each quarter, customers learned to wait for end-of-quarter pricing, and sellers who had a poor quarter wrote it off by week eight and pushed everything into the next one. Our operations team hated the peaks.

We have gone back to an annual quota, kept monthly commission, and added a modest quarterly kicker for being on pace year to date. I would like to hear from anyone for whom discrete quarters have worked.