Many sales organizations struggle to find the “right” formula of structure and compensation that will support their sales success. Constant change, however, results in poor channel performance and failure to achieve required sales targets.
Sales Compensation and Structure Audits
Auditing of your sales compensation plans identifies design elements which are working and should be kept and where changes are required to improve program effectiveness. The audit will also determine any deficiencies in how the roles are structured, process problems and data issues that must be resolved to optimize sales performance. The audit report provides a “blueprint” for short and longer-term improvement.
Now sales compensation design approach really has three components to it. There are the research and investigation around the current plan designs and their performance. So that’s getting input from management, input from salespeople, looking at the report of how the performance has been, looking at elements like turnover as well as the performance distribution of the sales force as a whole.
A lot of that research upfront is absolutely necessary so that when decisions get made they’re based upon information and data as opposed to trial and error or, some sort of a guesstimate of what’s the best plan that we need. It’s as opposed to anecdotal information, it’s more fact-based. That’s one of the things that really is a difference between how we do this. We do that upfront research with the customer, we get we ask them for a lot of information so that we can research what’s happening with the current performance and where it’s not meeting expectations.
