Let's talk sales incentives. What works? What doesn't? What are mistakes sales leaders make when designing sales incentive programs? What's a good framework for sustainable keeping your reps motivated? (We recently wrote a post about this—link in the comments—but I'd love to hear you're thoughts!) #salesincentives #salesincentive #sales #salesmanagement #salesteam #salesmotivation #salesleadership #salesoperations
This is a great Rabea Dönig
I'm a big believer that new logo hunters who work the entire sales process need to be rewarded appropriately for the feat of landing a client.
Here's a question: How often do you review the comp plan? Annually? Would/Should you consider reviewing/changing it mid-year, given the crisis?
Pay on profitability as one of the metrics and customer retention. When you add value, customers want to work with you and pay a premium to do so. I worked for one company who said they were going to pay on profitability and I was rubbing my hands with glee due to the fact I had a margin of 70%+ while the average was about 45%. However the powers that be decided they'd only pay on profitability increases from the previous year. I spoke to them that this in fact makes it impossible for the high performers to get the bonus while weak performers only need to increase it a bit to get paid. I was ignored, dropped my profitability from 70%+ to 40% in a couple of months, made maximum bonus the following year by increasing it to about 45% and then left the company. I was so disappointed as I loved that company, still do, they were just too far removed from the reality of what they were implementing
I used to work in sales in the financial industry, one of the worst practice I've seen is deferring sales commissions/bonuses earned to the next quarter or worse, end of the year and only disbursed if the sales rep is still in employment. Lots of sneaky things can happen in the Management's side as well as black swan events that can snatch away otherwise earned commissions. I believe disbursing earned commissions monthly is a good way to get cash in the rep's hand immediately to get them motivated to perform consistently.
I really like using Bonusly at SurveyMonkey - motivates & inspires me/us.
Our post on sales incentives: https://blog.close.com/sales-incentives/
Although ha good list of different incentives to offer your team, the key is to decide what metric / KPI / goal to measure and reward. Be aware that what measures get's done (Drucker was right), hence your goals should reward the 'right' behaviour and values. Also be mindful of using individual or team-related goals; i.e. do you want to promote team-work or create lone wolfs? As always, there isn't a silver bullet, instead each sales AND marketing team (you may want them to work together?!) need to find it's set up of goals to motivate sales and performance / Peter Önnby