Loyalty glossary · 12b. B2B, channel and trade incentives (26)
Spiff
A spiff is a short-term cash bonus paid to a channel partner or salesperson for selling a specific product or hitting a narrow target, paid immediately rather than accrued over time.
A spiff is the opposite of an accrual in the loyalty mechanic. It pays now for a single action, while an accrual pays later for cumulative behaviour. The distinction matters because a spiff does not build a balance or a future benefit; it is a one-time transfer of value for a one-time transaction.
A manufacturer offers a 100 dollar spiff per partner per month for selling a new line, on top of a 12 percent base commission on invoiced revenue. A partner who invoices 10,000 dollars in the month earns 1,200 dollars in commission and 100 dollars in spiff, a 1 percent lift on the month's revenue, but only if they hit the product-specific quota.
A spiff works against activity-based qualification, which rewards sustained engagement over time. A partner can earn a spiff once and then ignore the line for the rest of the year. That is the design flaw: the incentive does not change the partner's default behaviour, it only buys a single act of attention.
A spiff campaign can inflate the active member rate for a month, because partners who take the bribe count as active. They vanish the next month unless another spiff rolls in. The metric that matters is not how many partners were active during the campaign, but how many remain active without one.
The operator that reaches for a spiff first has conceded that the product or the channel margin cannot stand on its own. That is not a loyalty programme, it is a rental of attention. Paying 5 percent more in spiffs to move a weak line is cheaper than fixing the line, until the partners learn to wait for the next rental.