4 Keys to Reward Results - Compensation Plans
Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011When I work with clients to structure incentive-based compensation for their sales and non-sales teams, I see many issues. Where many get trapped is that they start in the middle. What I mean is they focus on the compensation itself instead of their business goals. The right incentives reward professionals for contributing to achieving strategic goals. Don’t blame your reps, blame the plan. Remember that not all business is “good business.” If you want to expand into new markets, grow existing accounts, or capture specific clients, be sure to reward the behavior that is important to your strategic growth. Here are four areas that can help improve your compensation plan.
Build Accountability Tie incentives to individual, group, and company performance. At least 1/2 of the incentives should be tied to individual performance. However, we want to encourage team play. The only way to max-out is if your group meets its goals, the company meets its goals, and you meet your personal goals. This creates good peer pressure for an under-performing team member. It also encourages top performers to help less experienced team members. Having a bonus pool to reward across teams can instill a sense of “what’s good for the company is good for me.” - something that has been lost in many companies.
Credibility comes from respect: the prospect respects your approach, your company, your appearance, and/or your mannerisms. Credibility comes from trust: the prospect trusts what you have to say; trusts your company; trusts you. Credibility comes from delivering wanted results: the prospect believes you can deliver what s/he wants; the prospect sees from your presentation s/he will get desired results; or your past performances suggest you’ll deliver wanted results again. Failure in any one of respect, trust and/or results and you’ll have little to no credibility.
There are degrees of credibility in business. They range from no credibility, to (1) getting a meeting with someone, to (2) getting someone to answer your questions, to (3) getting someone to listen to you, to (4) getting someone to believe you, to (5) getting someone to buy from you, to (6) getting someone to use you as a resource/trusted advisor.
Sell at full price, get 100% recognition. As they introduce discounts, the revenue recognition falls. So, at a 20% discount, they may only get credit for 70% of the revenue. The goal is to ensure that reps battle to preserve margin. Of course, there is no substitute for good negotiating and selling skills. Being the low bidder is not selling.
Credibility does not happen automatically. Most people don’t consciously calculate how to build the respect, the trust and the results necessary to develop credibility up front. They just do their thing. If the prospect/customer doesn’t pick-up on your thing s/he will be skeptical, possibly polite, and blows you off, or never calls back, or do nothing to help move you forward in the sale or with him/her. So let’s take note of what you’ve done, and not done, in life.
You could produce better and more leads. It can evaluate probable leads according to your business merchandise and your customer information and pre-qualify the leads which are more possibly be lucrative. Getting all of your divisions connected to the same system could indicate a better cooperation not just on one particular division but to any other as well. Since everyone has the right to use the data and the information, it could be easily distributed all throughout.
Sales force automation systems are of great advantage to any business who understands what they really wanted to acquire and want to have a great success as well. Such business who takes this into consideration will more probably over benefit from their decisions therefore helping them achieve their aims and objectives.
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