- Grow sales at lower cost. To improve sales productivity and get a better return on sales investment, the aim is to increase sales volume at a faster rate than the growth in sales costs When possible, do both: Grow sales and decrease the absolute cost of selling.
- Energize sales culture. A sales culture that celebrates sales excellence, seller competency and integrity will win seller engagement. It’s leadership’s responsibility to offer compelling customer value propositions that sellers embrace.
- Ensure right place and time. Sales strategy planning continually matches customer preferred buying patterns and provisions marketing, selling and service resources with the right configuration of customer contact resources. Sellers need to be in the right place, saying the right things at the right time.
- Reward outcomes. Sales performance programs build sales competencies and reward outcomes. Both objectives play a role in improving sales productivity. Well-designed sales compensation plans have output performance measures that reward expected sales outcomes for the sales job.
When asked, sales leaders list
“improving sales productivity” as their top
priority. This means increasing sales yield per salesperson. The
objective is to grow sales volume at a faster rate than the growth in sales
costs, thus improving return on sales investment. When possible, do both: Grow
sales and decrease the absolute cost of selling.
For sales leaders, the hunt is always
on to improve sales productivity. We know that sales compensation contributes
to improving sales productivity, but it does not stand alone.
The Nuts and Bolts of Sales Performance Programs
Sales compensation sits among an array
of sales performance programs, including the company’s value proposition, sales
culture, sales strategy, talent, sales training, professional development,
sales supervision, personal and public progress and numerous sales reward
programs including sales compensation.
Updating the sales compensation
program might improve sales productivity but finding complementary companion
programs is just as important; maybe more so.
Each of the following sales
performance programs contributes to improving sales productivity.
Company Value Proposition and Sales
Culture. Do your sellers
believe in your product? The company’s value proposition—what the company
offers customers—forms the basis of seller allegiance. Products that improve
customer outcomes will inspire sellers to promote and persuade customers to
purchase. A sales culture that celebrates sales excellence, seller competency
and integrity will win seller engagement. It’s leadership’s responsibility to
offer compelling customer value propositions that sellers embrace. Exceptional
sales leadership builds a sales culture of engagement, accountability,
collaboration and acknowledgment of success. Leadership instills the mission:
“Here is why customers need us.” Sellers need to have a customer mission — not
just a sales job.
Sales Strategy. Are your sellers correctly aligned with the
buyer journey? Go-to-customer design requires mapping the customer experience
and placing sellers at the buyer’s inflection point when additional knowledge,
risk reduction and purchase assurance encourages customer purchasing. Sales
strategy planning continually examines customer preferred buying patterns and
provisions marketing, selling and service resources (both digital and personal contact)
with the right configuration of customer contact resources. Sellers need to be
in the right place, saying the right things at the right time.
Talent. Do you have the best sellers?
Sales-productivity improvement depends on the caliber of the hired sales
talent. Do your sellers have the potential for sales excellence? Do they
possess the desire and capacity to learn their sales skills, continually
improve their effectiveness and apply their full efforts to sales success?
Recruiting outcomes work best when a professional staffing function applies
company standards to sourcing, assessing and hiring the right talent. When a
current seller fails to meet expectations, a supportive performance improvement
plan (PIP) should provide a reasonable opportunity to correct performance or a
graceful and supportive exit of the organization.
Sales Training. The best productivity investments rest with
sales training. This begins with a well-articulated onboarding process to learn
internal systems, understand products and applications, gain customer insights,
bond with team members and acclimate new sellers — why we are here, why our work contributes to company and
customer success and how we conduct ourselves. Training continues by learning advanced sales/customer
techniques, access to just-in-time knowledge and sales execution excellence.
Certification programs, mentors, learning management systems, behavior modeling
and predictive selling systems all contribute to sellers’ growing competencies.
Sales Supervision. Sales supervisors have the greatest positive
impact on their sellers when they act as coaches helping sellers learn skills,
assess mistakes, manage emotions and celebrate victories. Use affirmative
management rather than judgment management practices. Affirmative management
assumes that sellers wish to succeed. Use positive encouragement: Each success
is a personal confirmation, and each setback is a learning opportunity.
Judgment management — a critical focus on failures — is less effective. It suppresses
open learning and induces unhealthy avoidance behaviors.
Personal and Public Progress. Great salespeople want to improve their
performance. They want reports, charts and indices to see how they are
performing against their assigned goals. They want to be a member of a
supportive and encouraging work group so they can review their progress with
their peers, see their rankings, get advice from others and celebrate
successes. Weekly sales funnel calls should be about selling successes and less
about failures. Additionally, management should encourage sellers to develop
unique sales solutions to address challenging sales opportunities. Sales
management should celebrate new, creative techniques and share them with
others, complimenting the creative seller for their initiative and
ingenuity.
Professional Development. The company should have a well-articulated
professional development program with annual reviews, career planning and
development commitments. The annual review should give the seller an
opportunity to assess progress-to-date and set goals for further improvements.
Career planning includes progression to more responsible selling roles,
specialist opportunities and sales management. Development commitments confirm
how leadership will give each seller learning and accountability opportunities
to contribute to personal and professional growth.
Reward Programs. In addition to sales compensation, there are
numerous reward programs, including contests/spiffs, merit increases and
recognition events. These programs need to align with the overall sales
strategy and work in concert with each other including the sales compensation
plan. Sales management should use contests and spiffs to support marketing
campaigns, new products and timely sales initiatives. The annual merit increase
program should keep sellers’ total compensation aligned with labor market
levels and reward exceptional performance, sales collaboration and growth in
professional competencies. Recognition programs should celebrate sales
successes. Ongoing memos of personal accomplishments, public acclaim of sales
success and annual recognition events contribute to affirmation of sales
culture excellence.
Sales Compensation
Here is the challenge for sales
compensation stakeholders: What is the role of sales compensation among other
productivity improvement efforts? What are common misconceptions about sales
compensation? And how does sales leadership align all sales performance
programs?
Here are some benchmarks sales
compensation tenets:
Sales management uses reward
programs to recognize outcomes.
Sales management can use contest/spiff success to reward short-term objectives,
merit increases to recognize professional growth and recognition programs to
celebrate seller outcomes.
The best use of sales compensation
is to reward tangible sales results. Well-designed sales compensation plans have output performance
measures that reward expected sales outcomes for the sales job. Each job has
its own sales compensation plan featuring unique measures for the sales role.
These measures are carefully selected, reviewed once a year and aligned with
the preferred outcomes for the sales job.
Sales compensation isn’t intended
to instill loyalty, drive culture or reward competency. Other sales management programs excel better
at these objectives.
Sales compensation formulas provide
rewards consistent with market practices: Low, median, and high-performer payouts match or exceed market
practices. The subcomponents of a successful sales compensation plan, such as
quotas, account assignment practices and sales crediting rules, contribute to
ensuring the payout formula is rewarding seller-driven sales success.
Getting Program Alignment
Sales compensation
stakeholders/designers need to evaluate the whole family of programs to test
for strengths and weaknesses in alignment, messaging, measurement and rewards
to ensure clarity to the sales team.
An annual review of all sales
performance programs is an excellent way to accomplish this goal. Start with
these questions:
“What are each of the performance programs saying to our sellers?”
“Do these programs make sense?”
“Are they consistent with each other?”
“Do they correctly align our sellers
with the company mission and sales culture?”
Surprised at the extent of
misalignment among the programs? It’s important to remember that sales
compensation does not stand alone. For it to be effective, it needs to be
compatible and align with all sales performance programs.
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