Sales Compensation Blog

We have written about the importance of tracking sales performance before, but wanted to revisit based on what I have seen recently. Many SMB's are missing an opportunity. And that opportunity, put simply, is that the act of showing people where they stand on a goal, motivates them towards that goal.

As a teen I used to wrangle for a dude ranch in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming. Even if we were days out, as soon as we started heading home, the horses and mules picked up speed. The closer we were to their corral, the faster they would go. In fact on one trip, a pack mule named Bernard was so anxious to get home that he broke free and into a gallop.

My horse Bill and I had to cut him off on a narrow trail. Now that was adventure. Amazingly, the same motivation works for humans.

Do you know why fund raisers keep using those red thermometers, because the rising indicator motivates additional donations.

So my point is that even if you have the best comp plan for your sales team, many businesses lose significant motivating value by not providing clear, timely and regular visibility on where reps stand vs.their goal. Every organization has Bernards, they just need to be let loose.

See how we make sales performance management easy with our Sales Portal and an integrated one for Salesforce.com here.