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?
Sales Playbooks
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In partnership with Sales Psychology, we can provide an end to end solution to develop content for your Playbook
What is a Sales Playbook?
A well designed playbook should provide your sales force with a competitive edge in knowing what is the right "play" for any given situation in the sales process.
Our objective for playbooks is to go beyond this strict tactical focus.
We observe that most sales teams - especially national teams of 10 or more sales people - do not enjoy the benefits of scale that should power their results and justify the heavy investment in sales overheads.
Typically, sales teams are falling down in five areas
- Lack of a clear Sales strategy
- Sales people don’t comply with a standard process (and perhaps the process isn't documented or well understood)
- Recruitment and onboarding processes are ad hoc and reactive
- Sales tools are either under developed or not used at all
- Incentives and rewards are not aligned to the strategy
What makes a Sales Playbook work
A well designed playbook should communicate the strategy and document best practice in all of the above areas. Furthermore, there needs to be a two way dialogue between sales people and management on what goes into the playbook. Using collaboration tools - a Sales Playbook evolves over time to develop what is the best sales practice for YOUR business (not some other company).
Finally, we bring measurement tools and the concept of gamification to the Sales Playbook. These two critical components mean that
a) you keep track of the degree of compliance and performance of your sales team in using the playbook
b) the system encourages sales people to collaborate and use the playbook in their day to day sales planning activity
PerformanceCentre provide an innovative soluton for winning Sales Playbooks.