How to Effectively Explain Compensation Plans to Your Employees

Compensation plans don’t speak for themselves. Make sure your best workers and recruiting prospects know you value them by clearly communicating pay and other forms of compensation incentives. These conversations are necessary for a healthy company culture and your business’s bottom line. What tools can you leverage to make communicating compensation simple for you and your employees?

Support your team and retain talent

The top two reasons sales people cite for leaving their jobs are lack of engagement and burnout, and 89% leave for a higher-paying position. What if your compensation plans are competitive, but your reps don’t see it that way? Clearly communicating your comp plans is the difference between keeping your reps — and keeping them motivated — and losing them to something they perceive as “better.” While businesses are jockeying to attract and retain the best talent, the ability to explain compensation plan benefits clearly is a game changer. An automated sales compensation management solution (SCMS) gives you the necessary level of transparency and the tools you need to show your workers you support them and recognize their value.

An automated sales compensation management solution (SCMS) helps you explain how you arrive at your compensation numbers. But what about those reps who aren’t hitting their quotas? A SCMS also helps managers find ways to support those reps. With the ability to track and look at data in real time, sales managers and business leaders can seek other ways to engage these employees. Maybe a different kind of incentive will motivate them? It’s easy to switch reps to different plans or modify existing commissions when all compensation plans are on the same system.

Make sure compensation data is accessible

What good is data if you can’t easily find or make sense of it? Switching from manual data processing to an automated SCMS turns data mining from a grueling, time-consuming hassle into a simple question of access. Key metrics are tracked in real time and available to all departments through a centralized, and secure, cloud-based system. With an automated system, your data is secure, protected, reliable, and free of the human errors common to spreadsheets.

With a SCMS, different departments can track the data they need instantly. It offers hundreds of different data reports, and there’s no need to make manual calculations or jump through hoops with formulas. A robust SCMS acts as one true data source — which can be customized to present the data you need as you need it. It makes breaking down complex compensation plans easier for both managers and employees. And when it comes time to make important business decisions, you’ll have the data you need to guide you.

Explain everything from salary to incentives

Your employees are unique, and what engages and motivates one may not work for another. So, your compensation plans must be agile enough to change with a growing and evolving sales team. They must also be able to pivot when new challenges and opportunities present themselves. For example, during the pandemic, many sales reps feel burned out, and morale is at an all-time low. Sales incentives might need to change during difficult times. You may want to include more growth opportunities — or even PTO days for mental health breaks — in your compensation packages. Whatever the shift, you need a system flexible enough to handle changes with ease.

Your employees need clarity about their performance goals and their compensation. A good SCMS gives you and your employees clarity by automating your compensation plans, so you can communicate to employees how their payments are calculated and what other benefits they can expect. They’ll understand commission, bonuses, incentives, and what KPIs they need to hit to reach each target. Instead of being disappointed when they get their paycheck, they’ll know exactly what to expect with their commission payout.

We’re facing a crisis in our workforce — with 51% of employees reporting being disengaged at work. Now’s the time to support your employees with more clearly defined compensation packages and the data to drive conversations between managers and their sales teams. The SalesVista’s SCMS keeps your finger on the pulse of your business — optimizing top performers and supporting those who need a bit more motivation.