Most SPIFFs and sales contests are funded on gut feel: a prize pool gets set, a leaderboard goes up, and nobody checks the math until after the invoices land. This calculator forces the math up front. It projects the incremental revenue and margin your expected activity lift should generate, discounts it for the two things that quietly wreck contest ROI — pull-forward (reps just moving deals they'd have closed anyway into the contest window) and admin overhead — and tells you the exact lift percentage you need to hit to break even.
Enter the prize pool and how many people can win it, the contest length, and what participants normally book in a typical month (their baseline). Then set your expected activity lift — the realistic % increase in booked revenue you think the contest will drive — along with your average gross margin. The two "reality check" fields matter most: pull-forward estimates how much of that lift is really just deals shifted in time (not net-new), and overhead captures the admin cost of running the contest itself. The tool then shows the net incremental margin you can expect, an ROI ratio, the exact lift % you'd need to hit breakeven, and how much margin of safety you have above or below that line.
If team performance keeps coming up in your 1:1s, the gap is usually structural, not effort. The Mastery Diagnostic measures your team against a written 27-framework standard in two weeks, and tells you exactly where the layer breaks.