Leverage Sales Compensation to Drive Sales Performance

Sales compensation is one of your greatest sales performance management tools; no other program will drive sales behavior, and ultimately, sales results to the same extent as incentive compensation. Getting salespeople to sell the right products and services to the right customers at the right price is the best way to increase revenue and profits, and compensation is the best lever to motivate sales people. The management truism, "what gets measured gets managed and what gets awarded gets done," is spot on. Sales representatives are much more likely to work towards a company's strategic goals when properly motivated by well-designed, accurately calculated, and frequently communicated sales compensation plans.

Achieving these goals requires a proper technology foundation - one that supports agility, speed, accuracy, reporting and analysis. Unfortunately, in most organizations, this technology foundation is absent. In fact, most companies today manage sales compensation programs with Excel spreadsheets and Access databases.

As a result, sales executives are handcuffed by slow, rigid, and unsophisticated systems that provide no strategic value, and sales representatives are frustrated and de-motivated by delays, errors, and uncertainties in their commission payments.

The result is the Performance Gap. The Performance Gap is the delta between the performance results executives expect from their sales compensation programs . . .