Sales Compensation Blog

It is the last day of the quarter/month for many sales people today. This starts the beginning of a painful administrative process for your payroll and sales operations. Below is a "story of the ‘deal spreadsheet.'"

1. This infamous "deal spreadsheet" is sent from sales or operations over to accounting where commission is calculated on each deal and inserted into another column in the spreadsheet- this can take up to 2 days.
2. The spreadsheet is then sent to sales managers for approval and discussion. 1-2 days
3. After their changes are put into the spreadsheet, it is broken into individual spreadsheets for each rep and emailed out with the appropriate deals, calculated commissions and expected total commission payment. 1 day
4. Sales people evaluate their spreadsheet, compare it with their own shadow accounting and the back and forth begins- this takes another day. 1 day
5. At this point, if there is a discrepancy, (and this happens about 90% of the time, according to this white paper) it requires emails or discussions between sales people and managers or sales people and admins. 1-4 days

So, up to two weeks after the end of the month/quarter sales people are still unsure of their commission amounts from last month/quarter, that is no way to build trust or motivate. Using spreadsheets is probably one of the most inefficient ways to build trust within your organization and it doesn't drive growth. Sales people don't feel like they can trust their comp spreadsheet, so they pick it apart every quarter and waste precious selling hours doing an administrative task that just takes from the bottom line.

What are you experiencing? What takes the most time in your process? What have you done to make it better?