Developing an effective sales compensation plan is essential to attract, motivate and retain exceptional sales talent. Our proven design process has been used by many high performing sales organizations to deliver outstanding sales performance.
Our sales compensation design experts have the industry expertise and experience with every type of selling role and sales situation that will ensure that you get the plan you need to achieve your sales targets.
Your plans will be aligned to the business and sales goals, support tactical execution and have a daily influence on desired sales behaviour. Our sales compensation design experts have the industry expertise and experience with every type of selling role and sales situation that will ensure that you get the plan you need to achieve your sales targets.
The Design
Different sales roles work with different customers or products or processes and as a result, if you have one plan fits all, you’re going to reward some people well but you’ll penalize others. The key around design is to make sure that it is role-specific and you’re measuring the things that can be influenced by the individual in that role.
The Framework
It starts off with looking at the sales compensation framework and the relationship between the roles. The framework encompasses things like 1) total compensation, 2) the combination of base salary plus incentive and 3) the total compensation for each of the roles.
It looks at the weighting of the measures, so it’s not just selecting the measures but it’s also looking at how you weight those measures in terms of compensation in order to communicate to the sales force the relative value of each of those measures.
So that’s part of the communication by weighting the measures.
Those are the things and then creating the commission rates, the payout tables for bonuses etc, that’s all part of the design phase.
Implementation
The implementation includes costing of the plan to see how it affects individuals from a direct change. If we change the plan from A to B, for example, how will that impact each individual? We then look at it from a more global perspective; if we move from Plan A to B, what will the impact be in terms of overall costs, expected results etc, for the whole sales force.
We then test it with the field. We go back to the people that we talked to originally and we say here’s what you told us, here’s how it affected the plan, is this the kind of plan that will motivate and drive a great performance for your role?
During this stage we also help companies address communication requirements and training. We help to ensure managers are trained – so they understand the plans and how they are rolled out.
