Your Compensation Recipe for Sales Success

For top-performing sales teams, success doesn’t happen by accident. The best sales teams apply a proven recipe by combining the right ingredients with the best talent, and adding motivation and focus along the way, to create the best results.

Review your recipe

Just as your family’s traditional, homespun recipes deliver the tastiest meals, your company’s sales commission structure provides better results without complex calculations and 57-step processes. Clear, easily understood, and accessible commission models deliver more sales success. Still, each company must determine the right commission plan for meeting its specific needs.

Use these three steps to create your custom recipe for sales success:

• Define a sales commission model to motivate your sales team. From tiered to gross margin, and absolute to relative models, there’s no shortage of commission plan possibilities. But the right plan for your sales team depends on a variety of factors, including budget, goals, industry, and experience. For example, new sales professionals may be more motivated by an absolute commission plan, whereas seasoned professionals or sales executives are better served by a gross margin or relative commission model.
• Clarify sales team priorities to align with business goals. Your sales commission plans should evolve with your business. After all, your commission strategy drives sales team focus and productivity. Ensuring alignment with your current business goals is essential for current success and future growth. Clarify your sales team’s priorities, and ensure that these priorities are rewarded under your current compensation structure.
• Identify any missing ingredients. With the dual goals of motivating your sales reps and driving business growth, ask yourself what your commission plan is missing. In many cases, complex industries rely on complex commission models, which can reduce motivation and slow business growth. To motivate your sales team and fuel growth, your commission plans should be simple, transparent, accurate, and easily accessible.

Refine your recipe

No successful recipe goes untested. Rather than approach compensation as a one-and-done operation, consider commission plans a process workflow subject to continuous improvement as your business grows. As you refine your commission model, consider:

• Recruiting and retaining. Sales professionals want compensation transparency. A clear commission structure informs a comprehensive compensation strategy for both attracting new talent and motivating your current sales team.
• Streamlining processes. Many commission models get bogged down in manual processes for data entry, tracking, or completing complex calculations. Manual commission management requires hours of work, and the results are prone to error. An advanced sales commission management solution automates many steps of the process, provides real-time data, and easily generates custom reports for further iteration.

Get cooking

Once your commission recipe is complete, the next challenge is clearly communicating it to all stakeholders. This step is easier and more efficient with a simplified, easy-to-follow commission management solution.

An advanced sales commission management platform makes commission plans easy to understand and convey to your sales team. It also allows you to organize and manage all sales commission data in a single place, thus providing full transparency for everyone within your organization. Leadership and executives can review essential data with the help of financial modeling tools, advanced data analytics, and custom reporting options. Finance and HR teams can access real-time commission data from your team and use automation tools to streamline workflows, approvals, and payout processes. Individual sales reps can easily access and clearly understand their own commission structure so they know exactly what they’re earning, when it will be paid, and which sales activities drive the most success.

With all your company’s sales commission data in one place, you can easily see what’s working and where further action is needed to optimize productivity and performance. Implementing strategic improvements is made easier when you can manage compensation or workflow changes from a centralized platform — and accurately forecast the results. Add the data and analytics for continuously reviewing, refining, and improving your commission plans, and you’ve created the perfect recipe for sales commission success.