Achieving Success with Your Sales Incentive

Most sales executives agree that sales compensation should be one of the most effective tools for motivating sales people to sell more and achieve quota targets. So what steps are required to achieve desired results with your sales compensation programs? See the list below to find out.

Five Steps to Effective Sales Incentive Programs

1. Model various plan scenarios and forecast attainment results and commission costs. The first step to an effective program is to deploy plans that provide suitable attainment rewards at reasonable cost. This cannot be a guessing game or you may end up with a dangerously skewed attainment/cost distribution curve. You need to model various scenarios and carefully examine results before deploying your plans.
2. Measure the right results. Define a limited set of measures for each plan. These measures should align your sales team with specific corporate goals for your products and services, such as revenue, margin, market share, or new customer acquisition.
3. Monitor results to stay on top of progress and cost. Provide sales and finance executives the ability to track and compare, in real time, modeled and actual results so you can make adjustments if necessary.
4. Anticipate the impact of possible market and organizational changes. Understand how commission costs at the individual and company level will shift in response to key changes. Set up alerts and be prepared to adjust plans accordingly at the earliest sign of change.
5. Provide your sales staff and managers with visibility and timely feedback on results so they know where they stand and what they can do to improve performance so your company goals are met.

 

Managing sales compensation strategically to achieve desired results is a process and a science; you simply cannot achieve desired results without a sales compensation system that supports that process. As sales consultant Rick Page says in his book of the same title – Hope is Not A Strategy.

That’s why every month, more and more companies are turning to Compel™. Compel contains all the necessary tools to help you design, model, test, roll-out, calculate, track, communicate, manage and pay on the most effective sales plans for your organization.

In fact, Compel is the only on-demand incentive management system that provides a complete set of plan modeling and commission forecasting capabilities. Compel allows you to forecast future commission expenses and model the impact of plan changes on commission cost and individual earnings. In addition, Compel enables sales representatives or independent agents to forecast their own earnings based on future sales. And, Compel is also the only on-demand sales compensation management system to provide real-time visibility into performance metrics via interactive dashboards.

To learn more about strategic sales compensation and Compel, follow the links below.