Sales team hitting the brakes? Remove these common roadblocks.
Posted by Teanna Spence on Fri, Jan 22, 2010 @ 05:38 PM
An effective sales compensation plan is critical in motivating the sales team. It provides focus and rewards for the right results. To make sure that your plans help speed your team towards success, avoid these typical sales compensation plan roadblocks:
Plans that are too complicated: These plans cause reps to either waste valuable time trying to figure them out or, even worse, to ignore the plan altogether and do whatever they think is right.
Too many measures: A measure includes quotas, goals and any other expectation of attainment for the sales rep. If you have more than five measures, the plan loses critical focus. In my experience, you should have 3 or fewer measures to avoid distraction, frustration and confusion.
Unrealistic quotas: You want to have at least half of the reps making quota. Otherwise, the reps won't be able to see themselves as achievers and will quickly become unmotivated.
Financial rewards delivered too late to be associated with the event: It's human nature - when we are rewarded right away for a behavior, the motivation to repeat the behavior is strong. The more you wait to pay incentives to your sales rep, the more the reward loses its power to motivate.