Useful Information Articles

Setting your sights on pay for performance - designing the pay curve

“Pay for performance” is the underlying driver of most sales incentive compensation plans. Indeed, it should be a key goal for all plans. The tightness of correlation between individual pay outcomes and performance outcomes is a key measure of incentive plan effectiveness.

Two easy ways to lift Sales Performance by 10%

Finding and winning customers is something of interest to most Australian businesses. It’s an important strategy for growth and it’s expensive.

How many sales people should achieve target in my annual sales incentive plan?

Sales Compensation 101 - Chuck Csizmar

Great article from Chuck Csizmar on the fundamentals of a Sales Incentive Plan.

You asked: What is a best practice incentive plan?

Gamification: The low tech way to engage your staff

A great article from Myriam Robin, published on the LeadingCompany blog. The article talks about the potential that gaming elements have to encourage and motivate staff. Elements like League Ladders, Rankings and soft competition, as in gaming, are great motivators.

Webinar 14th December 2012: Planning for 2013: three key ingredients for the perfect incentives mix

Free webinar: Sales Compensation Planning for 2013 - Three key ingredients for the perfect incentives mix

Are paying incentives worth it?

Do a search on “Daniel Pink and incentive compensation” and you will find more than a few well meaning articles from people proclaiming the end is nigh for commission payments and incentives for sales teams.

Incentive plan builder

Introducing the new Sales Incentive Plan Builder – Instant automation of your incentive compensation management process Based on our deep and broad expertise in designing and implementing plans for many clients across all major industry verticals, PerformanceCentre.com now offers a set of “ready-to-go” incentive plan solution templates.

Integrated non-cash incentive and recognition module

Integrating cash and non-cash compensation strategies will deliver the best result Effective sales incentive compensation strategies are implemented using two reward levers Cash compensation (variable pay) Non-cash incentives (recognition and reward)

League Ladders

League Ladders The effective use of league ladders and stack rankings will often drive discretionary effort from sales people. League ladders are especially effective for running sales contests where there is a reward for achieving target or for being placed in the top echelon of sales performance (eg top 20%). A timely and accurate ladder that is published in a 'public' forum can drive a level of focus and activity that is not possible with private sales incentive compensation. Stack rankings can be used to communicate 'relative' performance to individuals. This can be especially powerful in sales roles where external factors may play a large role – but the individuals performance to their peer group is paramount (eg pharmaceutical).

Data capture and system integration

PerformanceCentre provides a flexible tool for gathering all the data you need to measure sales peformance and manage incentive plans and programs. The system will import any type of data from any system in csv, xml, txt, xls formats. You can automate data feeds from your systems or load data via the administration interface.

Secure Hosting

PerformanceCentre delivers industry–leading Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for hosting and application availability. The level of security provided through our hosting service is at the forefront of incentive data security standards. PerformanceCentre is hosted at Macquarie Telecom's data centre in Australia.

Sales Playbooks

In partnership with Sales Psychology, we can provide an end to end solution to develop content for your Playbook.

Sales commission calculation for Telecommunications

Sales incentive compensation in the telecommunications industry is characterized by several complicating factors: Various lines of business (mobile, wireline, broadband etc) incorporating a large range of products and rate plans Recurring revenue streams as well as transactional sales drivers Sales teams covering all role types: field sales, contact centre, direct and indirect channels, wholesale Large customer numbers Complications measuring gross margin versus revenue Complications measuring the value of new business orders The importance of retention business but the difficulty of incentivising retention sales activity

Sales commission software for Banking and Finance

From Business Bankers to Retail Branch managers to bank tellers to mortgage brokers and financial planners, incentive compensation varies significantly across all the key design components: Transaction volumes Payment frequency (transactional, month, quarter, annual) Sales teams covering all role types: field sales, contact centre, direct and indirect channels, wholesale Large customer numbers Complications measuring gross margin versus revenue Complications measuring the value of new business orders The importance of retention business but the difficulty of incentivising retention sales activity

Sales commission and incentive management for Pharmaceutical companies

Sales reps, team leaders, district managers, specialty reps etc typically are eligible for sales incentive compensation. Sales performance needs to be tracked by product or territory depending on the products being detailed. Other sales measures are often included such as territory coverage and frequency, business planning and selling skills.

Feature videos

These videos will step you through the features of PerformanceCentre.

Planning for 2013: three key ingredients for the perfect incentives plan

There are three key elements you need to focus on to ensure your Sales Incentive Plan for 2013 is perfect.

Cash vs non cash - The phony war

Will incentive practitioners ever stop arguing the pros and cons of cash and non-cash incentives?

Overweight and bloated incentive plans

Goal diffusion is one of the most common problems facing incentive plan designers.

If what gets measured, gets done, then...

Selecting your performance measures is typically the first stage of the sales incentive plan design process though it should be the sixth step.

Sales Incentives – using leading v lagging indicators of sales performance

I am frequently asked for ideas on how to more closely align incentives and rewards to the desired behaviours when designing a sales incentive plan.

Executive compensation fat cats or soft target?

The Age (8/10/11) reports that executive pay in Australia continues to grow at a healthy rate – approximately twice the rate of the average worker

Why do we need sales commission and incentives management teams?

If we are automating commissions then why do we need sales commissions and incentives teams? This seems like a legitimate question: Why should you continue to pay sales commission and incentive plan management teams to run something that you’ve automated with software? The answer is: It’s not so black and white.

Case Study: Top ten global medical devices organisation

A global medical device company has been experiencing rapid growth in Australia; currently employing 75 Sales Consultants, Product Specialists, Sales Associates and Managers.

Incentives and rewards - money for nothing

One of the classic “chestnuts” of HR management in the 21st century is that money is way down the shopping list of employees these days – especially Gen Y-ers.

Don’t get the wrong mix by mixing it with risk

We are now ready to get on with the plan design process.

Defending your well considered Sales Incentive Plans from KNEE JERKS

We are now in a sound position to move to the third module of my best-practice incentive design.

How to reinforce the foundations of your Sales Incentive Plan

My last edition of PerformanceMatters talked about establishing solid foundations upon which to build your Sales Incentive Plan. This issue continues the theme.

95% of sales commission plans are incomplete

This article identifies the first common oversight, and how to resolve it.

I’ve re-written the book on sales incentive planning

Unhappy with anything previously published; tired of theoretical frameworks that fell apart in the real world; encouraged by clients to end their sales incentive nightmares; and buoyed by initial success, I decided to document my approach to sales incentive planning. And to share it with the world.

performance center

performance center

Will Your 2013 Sales Plan Make It Through the 1st Q?

Effective sales are relationship-based and so are effective sales compensation plans. That's why the "transactional" communications that are so often used to explain sales compensation plans .

Major Australian retail bank

Our client, a major Australian retail bank run a comprehensive sales incentive compensation and recognition program for front line banking staff.

Case study: Australia's largest information provider

One of Australia’s largest information providers had considerable problems calculating fortnightly commissions for their 700 sales people.

Excel Hell

Build or license?