Sales Incentives · Pharma · Nigeria · Kenya · Ghana
How a pharma brand increased OTC sales rep performance by 40% across East and West Africa
A pharmaceutical company with OTC health products across Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana was running sales rep bonus programmes manually — delayed payouts, no real-time visibility, and significant HR overhead. Qifts replaced the manual process with automated incentive infrastructure.
40%
OTC volume uplift
0
Manual processing steps
3
Markets on one platform
Instant
Rep reward delivery
The situation
The company's field sales team across the three markets operated on a commission-plus-bonus structure. Monthly bonuses for hitting OTC volume targets were processed manually by the HR team — sales data collected from field managers, compiled, validated, and paid out typically 4 to 6 weeks after the performance period.
The delayed payout cycle was eroding the motivational effect of the incentive. Reps knew their bonus was coming but the connection between the sale and the reward was weakened by the time gap. Field managers spent significant time chasing data and resolving payment queries rather than managing performance.
The company also had no individual-level performance visibility. They could see regional aggregate numbers but couldn't identify their top-performing reps, underperforming territories, or the specific pharmacies where market share was being won or lost.
The programme
Qifts Trade Incentives was configured for the sales rep layer across all three markets. Each rep received a Qifts account linked to their phone number and local mobile money account — MTN airtime and Opay in Nigeria, M-Pesa in Kenya, MTN MoMo in Ghana.
Sales logged by field managers via the Qifts web dashboard — replacing spreadsheet collection
Reward triggered automatically when qualifying OTC sales were logged — same day
Individual rep leaderboard visible to the whole team in real time
Local currency delivery per market — NGN in Nigeria, KES in Kenya, GHS in Ghana
HR processing time reduced to zero — the platform handles all reward calculations and delivery
Field manager dashboard showing rep-level performance across territories
The results
OTC volume across the three markets increased 40% in the first full quarter of the programme. The company attributed the uplift primarily to two factors: the immediacy of reward delivery creating stronger behavioural reinforcement, and the leaderboard visibility creating competitive motivation among reps who previously had no visibility into their relative performance.
HR processing overhead for the sales incentive programme was eliminated entirely. The time the HR team had spent on bonus calculation, payment processing, and query resolution was redirected. Field managers reported spending significantly less time on incentive administration and more time on actual performance management conversations.
Individual rep performance data surfaced for the first time. The company identified their top 20% of performers, established what those reps were doing differently, and used that insight to coach the underperforming 30% — an improvement cycle that had been impossible when performance data existed only at the regional aggregate level.
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