Sales Compensation Blog

I am new to the Makana Marketing team and my first project was to help with our best practice webinar yesterday: Finalize your 2009 Sales Compensation Plans. I have been hosting web seminars for the past five years. And while the audiences and content are different they all virtually run the same. You set up in a room an hour before, do a final run through, make sure the recording software is working, test the polling features, line up questions for the end if no one from the audience happens to ask anything... And this is where the need Makana is filling is different

On my first Web Seminar yesterday we had 16 questions and they were still coming in 30 minutes after the scheduled end time. These weren't the "what's the dial in number?" questions, they were the "how can I drive results" type questions. I guess it shouldn't have surprised me, because while polling the audience we learned that 2/3 of the attendees needed to have their compensation plans completed by the end of January. That's only 11 business days away! No wonder people were so attentive.

While listening to Teanna, our on-staff sales compensation expert talk about comp plans and especially during the Q&A portion of the web seminar, I suddenly realized that it's a lot harder than just taking a percentage of revenue and paying it out to your sales people. There are people trying to develop team plans, develop different plans based on what products are sold and trying to manage accelerators. And it explains why 87% of the attendees were still analyzing, modeling and designing plans. I remember being in sales and those weeks of waiting around for my comp plan. In the mean time, I know I wasn't motivated to do much, because as Teanna described in the webinar, sales people are motivated by money and if you don't know you are getting paid, you aren't motivated to get the deal done. On average we got our completed comp plans 4-6 weeks into the quarter. And they re-did them every quarter. And senior management would sit down and review each one. At the time I was just irritated it took so long, but now I understand why and know that it can be better.

It's great to know Makana has a solution that saves time, makes sales people more motivated and in the end helps drive the company strategy versus just unloading product.