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If a Territory Manager is a “Hunting Farmer,” How Should Their Comp Work?
While many established sales organizations use the hunter-farmer model as their sales force organization model, there are inevitably geographic territories or customer segments that do not justify both “hunters” and “farmers’…
How do we reward salespeople for strategic sales activities?
If the comp plan focuses exclusively on immediate results, making progress for the long run may not seem very important to the salespeople. To focus sales activity on strategic effort…
Checklist for assessing the effectiveness of your plans
To prepare for your annual plan review, check with your sales and business leaders about how they think the current plans are doing using this checklist.
Sales Manager Comp – Sales Rollup or Management Plan
After the incentive plans for sales representatives are completed and modeled, the next step in a plan design project is to develop plans for the front-line Sales Managers. Companies generally take one of three approaches based on their pay philosophy.
What are best practices regarding quota setting?
To be fair, this is a topic worthy of a book rather than a blog post, but we cover a few of the key concepts here.
Managing base pay for sales roles
If you’re going to have base pay, manage it, varying base pay levels to differentiate among people based on value-creating attributes that don’t change year over year.
At what point should sales people be paid?
Finish paying when: (1) the sales person has done what you need them to do, and you are ready for them to focus on closing another one, and (2) you have a solid basis for knowing the value of what was sold – but there’s a bit more to it…
Are SPIFFs a good idea?
SPIFFs are a valuable tool in the sales compensation toolkit, but can be mis-used to the point that the SPIFFs seem to be in charge rather than sales management. Excessive SPIFF use is a clear sign that the core comp plan is not working as it should.
What types of draws are typically offered to sales representatives when joining a company with a long sales cycle (9-12 months)? How many months and at what % of target?
To address this, here’s an overview of a few ways to smooth the entree for a new rep, listed from the least to the most effective in a long sales cycle role…
Hiring your first sales person
For early stage businesses, your first sales hire is hard to do well. You don’t have a sales leader to help you confirm you have the right skills and temperament for the job. You’re not sure what to expect in terms of productivity…