The Future of Sales Roundtable: 2022 Pay Practices and Trends Survey Read-Out

Mark Donnolo
Michelle I never liked those web sessions and roundtables where they go. The session will start in 3 minutes and it’s in you’re like, am I in the right place?

Michelle Seger
That’s really kind of funny.

Mark Donnolo
So you’re in the right place. We’re here. We’re just hanging out.

Michelle Seger
I know it is kind of sitting there waiting and then it will say, I know and who is that voice anyway?

Mark Donnolo
Who is the voice? I think it’s the voiceover guy.

Michelle Seger
The voiceover guy.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah.

Michelle Seger
You know what? You have a really good radio voice, Mark. You could be a voiceover guy.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah. It’s like they used to say, you have a face built for a call center.

Michelle Seger
Oh, that’s really fun. Well, you have a voice for the radio. That’s for you have a backup.

Mark Donnolo
To bad you’re not on the radio, right?

Michelle Seger
Oh, we try, we try to get that old podcast and Freative Friday and stuff going and I say you’re on the radio.

Mark Donnolo
A little bit. A little bit.

Michelle Seger
Anyway. So I don’t know about everybody across the country, but we are having a really beautiful fall season here in Georgia. Kind of exciting. I love it. I love this is a great time of year when the leaves are changing, they’re falling, but it’s still warm out. I’m a warm weather person. I’ll admit it.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah, I’m kind of a transitional season person.

Michelle Seger
I don’t know what that means.

Mark Donnolo
But like in between, right? It’s like when, when it’s hot, you want to be cold. When it’s cold, you want to be hot. And it’s just like it’s like it’s right in between. It’s just right. But it doesn’t last very long.

Michelle Seger
Yeah. That’s why I love it when it gets into November and it’s still nice and warm. So I’m planning on if the weather holds out. I’d love to go hiking this weekend. So maybe into the North Georgia mountains. That would be good. It’s the first weekend I’ve got that and really do that because we’ve been back on the road traveling, haven’t we?

Mark Donnolo
We have. We have been out west. That’s right. That’s right. For anybody that saw that video, the Fistful of Data that was inspired by Clint Eastwood’s Fistful of Dollars. So apologies to Clint Eastwood he probably did not see it anyway.

Michelle Seger
I think he would like it if he did. Those are back in the days when he was making all those old spaghetti westerns. Mark, you know why they’re called spaghetti Westerns?

Mark Donnolo
Yes, I do. Because it was like they used to remember they can you’d get like Chef Boyardee SpaghettiOs and you would eat those when you watched. Was that why? Because they made them in Italy. Nobody wanted the Westerns. They made them in Italy. And they took all the producers and everybody that they put on those movies.

Mark Donnolo
And they all had Italian names and they named them like James Smith. And they gave him like American names.

Michelle Seger
Yeah, it was really something. But that’s actually what made Clint Eastwood. But that’s how they made money. Right? And the people really liked them that before they were big, they make all the spaghetti westerns. I bet that was a really fun time to be in the movies.

Mark Donnolo
You know? Yeah. Yeah. And so all of our western scenes were shot in like Spain, I think.

Michelle Seger
I didn’t know that.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah, those are those are shot in Spain. So like The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Fistful of Dollars. Spain. Mm hmm. I know somebody is going to check on that. It’s going to show up in the chat. I know.

Michelle Seger
Well, it’s probably right, though.

Mark Donnolo
Probably right. I looked it up.

Michelle Seger
See, because he knew I was going to ask this question. He knew that I knew the answer because I watch all those old movies with my dad, including spaghetti westerns, and I probably even told you about it. I’m just saying.

Mark Donnolo
I might have.

Michelle Seger
Anyway.

Mark Donnolo
Oh, well, all right. So I think we’re going to get go in here. It’s at the hour 7 a.m. on the West Coast, 10:00 on the East Coast, which meant we had to get up early. But I did.

Michelle Seger
It’s eight and 11. I mean, our bodies, right? We had the time.

Mark Donnolo
Oh, that’s right. The time change to forget about that.

Michelle Seger
Simply it’s 8 and 11.

Mark Donnolo
That’s right. You know, when the times time changes. Yeah. You’re always, like feeling really, you know, stout. You’re like, yeah, I’m going to get up early now. I’m going to get up at six. But like, I don’t get up at six, I’m going to get up at six. And then you never do it. Oh, it always kind of fades away.

Michelle Seger
What time do you get up 9?

Mark Donnolo
9 Pacific and get this the wrong way? All right. So we’re going to get into it. Let’s go to the future sales roundtable. I’m Mark Donnollo and with me is my esteemed colleague, Michelle Seger . So we’re gonna be talking about the 2022 Pay Practices and Trends survey and give you some insight into in terms of what we learned and what we see ahead.

Michelle Seger
That’s right.

Mark Donnolo
So let’s go ahead and talk a bit about who we are. We’re SalesGlobe, we are problem solvers for sales. So basically what we do is we sell the toughest sales challenges and we do analytics driven problem solving around sales strategy, go to market sales, organization, design and of course sales compensation and quotas. And Michelle, you can see we’ve written a few books here, What Your CEO Needs to Know About Sales Compensation.

Mark Donnolo
We’ll probably be drawing upon some content from that today, but also some books around problem solving for sales like the Innovative Sale and the book called Quotas! with an exclamation point. Because.

Michelle Seger
People yell it!

Mark Donnolo
At nobody just says, quote, you always scream quotes.

Michelle Seger
Sadly enough. I mean, you got to have a little comedy there. But, you know, today, Mark, one thing I’d like to say is that we are going to be doing some problem solving. So as we revealed the survey results and I’m going to talk a little bit about that we went through and we’re giving you some of our viewpoint on what’s ahead and how you may be thinking about your plan designs for next year.

Michelle Seger
So the survey that we did with World at Work this year, we’ve done it four years running now, I believe, Mark. And we’ve had almost 700 companies participated. This was the largest number that we’ve had to date, over half of them. I think it’s good to know we’re involved in M&A over the past 12 months and we got a really good cross-section of industries, so we didn’t call them out this time and company size.

Michelle Seger
So we got a very good representation of midsize to large companies and small companies in there as well. And we’re really excited with the results.

Mark Donnolo
I’ll say as we get started here to this is a roundtable. So if you have questions, you want to throw comments and go ahead and put those in the chat or the Q&A box. I always get it wrong, whichever one it is. Chatter, it’s the chats, the chat, the chats with room and the chat will will answer those and keep it interactive.

Mark Donnolo
If you if you have thoughts or ideas that come up.

Michelle Seger
We will we’ll have some chit chat. So what they’ll do is they’ll will be interrupted if something’s relevant to the topic. We’re talking about other other questions. Please feel free to enter them in and we expect to have time at the end where we can cover those as well. So Mark, it was tough for us to pick out the big findings here and we distilled it down to six hybrid sales roles.

Michelle Seger
They continue to be the fastest growing role in sales today. We started to see that during the pandemic and it’s very important to say how we define the hybrid sales role. So this isn’t a working hybrid, right? So this isn’t a hybrid workforce question like I’m working in an office and working from home, but this is how am I interfacing with my clients, my buyers, my customers?

Michelle Seger
So it means that they’re spending roughly half of their time face to face and half of their time working, connecting with their customers in a virtual or remote fashion, regardless of where that takes place. So that’s how we define hybrid. And it was really a shift from field sales role, brick and mortar. And there was just something that I saw online today by one of our clients actually a big advertising company around brick and mortar returning in a huge way.

Michelle Seger
And they were posing the question on what do you prefer or do you prefer the in-store or shopping experience or ecommerce? Because they talked about Marc, the growth in brick and mortar and brick and mortar sales were up. I think it was like 18.7%.

Mark Donnolo
You know, people are back out in the stores. You know.

Michelle Seger
They’re in the stores and they talk about e-commerce, too, right. It was like up 14 and a half percent, something like that. So we’re going to talk about that. We’re going to talk about omnichannel finding and retaining talent. It remains a big challenge for sales organizations. And then three other things that we found true to all of you and incentive compensation.

Michelle Seger
One, revenue, it’s growing in usage. So it was bookings was always the strongest one for that new acquisition. And we’re going to talk to you about the role that revenue has been playing and then profit, how that’s been gaining adoption in pay plans and as a service continues off as a priority, although we know that it has been fraught with some may be economically driven, we’re not sure issues in in getting there.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah I think as a service I mean that’s been the trend, right? That’s where everything is going in terms of moving off of selling the one time license or the on premise thing to the as a service. Interestingly, and we’ll kind of color some of these comments today about what’s happening recently the as a service the SAS companies particularly in software are feeling the brunt of some of the recent economic pressure because of the variable nature of what they’re buying.

Mark Donnolo
Right. So in a couple of ways, you can you can use less if you need to. So you haven’t committed to that huge license or depending on your contract terms. And then if you if you’re laying people off and you don’t have as many people, well, you’re not going to have as many as a service seats. Right.

Mark Donnolo
And we haven’t heard as much about sales organization layoffs more as much as general layoffs. But certainly that can have an impact on the as a service segment.

Michelle Seger
Yeah, you’re exactly right. And what we’ve been hearing, some companies are even questioning, should we be pushing it as much? And, you know, and salespeople are saying, what I just be making more of, I sold that one time upfront, you know, cash, right. That that one with that upfront deal.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah so you know I see this point from Regina on on the the note here now there’s going to be a fee for returning clothes. They’ll drive people to go back to brick and mortar shopping. You know, that’s a really good point. I’ve heard some of that as well. Like I was at Stitch Fix or somebody $3.50 cent fee or maybe that was the wrong company.

Mark Donnolo
But it’s like $3.50 to return something. So it kind of, you know, diminishes that a little bit in terms of certain people I know that did buy massive amounts and they plan to return, you know, two thirds of it. Well, there’s going to be a little bit of a penalty for that. So so that’s been used. That whole free return thing’s been used for a while to really try to drive online.

Mark Donnolo
And, you know, people have really picked up during the pandemic, but there’s going to be a cost to that with some companies at least.

Michelle Seger
Well, let me tell you something. I’ll let you in on a secret. So I actually put this on my post this morning on LinkedIn. Mark and I talked about that. I bought a pair of jeans in a in a store, a little boutique, independently owned store in Nashville. But I found out about this new brand of clothing that’s made in America.

Michelle Seger
I happen to like made in America, clothing I, I seek out made in American stuff anyway. So I bought a pair of jeans from them online and I’m like, Are you kidding me? They didn’t fit. But, you know, same size, whatever. Ten bucks to return them.

Mark Donnolo
No way.

Michelle Seger
So now I’m like debating. Okay, is it going to be what’s the cost differential if I have them? You know, if I haven’t taken it a little bit, yeah. Just haven’t altered versus return them. So I’m going to find that out and I got ten days.

Michelle Seger
If I do return within ten days, got to keep up. So yeah, things are changing.

Mark Donnolo
Yep. I had the same thing happen with some boots I just bought. They were they were huge. Luckily I was able to return to the place. Got it back to me. They sent them back even before they got the return back. So, so look like then, then the smaller size I got, they were to tighten. I’m like, I can’t return these them somewhere in the smaller size.

Mark Donnolo
So I’ll get used to it. I will get used to this in the face.

Michelle Seger
You can’t get around like this anyway.

Mark Donnolo
Okay. All right. So let’s talk about what we’re seeing ahead here and some of these things guys we like to to put together is storylines, visuals, because it makes it a little easier to to grasp the idea. But like you said, Michel, the future of sales is hybrid. And there was a big question a while back of is field sales dead right?

Mark Donnolo
Is field sales gone? And what we found about a year ago is field sales is not gone. Field sales actually was coming back strong and there were some other categories that were coming back even stronger. So let’s take a look at that, at the height of the pandemic, we had about 60% of people working from home. Honey, I shrunk the presenters.

Mark Donnolo
It’s we had about 60% of people working from home or working remotely full time. And we saw about a year ago hybrid sales roles come onto the scene. Now, you mentioned before hybrid sales roles are not just like regular hybrid roles where people are working half time at home, but we’re really seeing they’re spending about half their time working face to face with customers, about half their time on on video or connecting in some virtual way.

Mark Donnolo
Right. In hybrid is a little different here, too, because they’re really trying to match up to what their customer does. So if they’re customers working hybrid or their customers are working remote, the salesperson is probably going to work remote as well because they’re not going to show up to an office with nobody there. Right.

Michelle Seger
Right.

Mark Donnolo
Okay. So big, big reveal of hybrid about a year ago. So we’ve seen that as the fastest growing sales job category. About 54% of companies are increasing hybrid sales role headcount. So that one is in the lead. It used to be, Michelle, inside sales to point number three there. Inside sales was the fastest growing up until the pandemic, but it’s still second fastest now.

Michelle Seger
So, you know, Mark, and we go back to 2019, it was the hiring rate was 15 to 1 for every sales role. So our field sales role, so 15 inside to every field salespeople that was hired.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah. So so you can see these are growing in a big way. They’re projected to continue to grow as well. And then you mentioned brick and mortar, Michelle. You can see 52% of companies increasing retail sales headcount. Okay. That that is a net increase. That’s not just accounting for a lot of high turnover in retail, but it’s a net sales net increase in retail sales headcount.

Mark Donnolo
So that’s big. So what we’re starting to see here and we’ll talk about this, we go along is omnichannel is getting stronger right. So people want to buy in different ways. You talked about the clothing. People want to buy in different ways and companies are outfitting to do that. Right. So they’re getting ready to do that. So so brick and mortar strong.

Mark Donnolo
And then let’s continue on to see where else the story leads. The the organization hiring, though. And again, we’ll color this with some recent news. The hiring has not been to the level that they predicted last year. So you see that these are big increases in headcount. They had actually projected faster increases in headcount. I think some of that is due to the whole war for talent that that things have been tight in terms of hiring.

Mark Donnolo
We’re now seeing it swing around the other way, which is more layoffs. And and I will say, like every time we talk about this, it was about a year and a half ago we were doing our predictions. We said this is going to happen. We said this is a short run phenomenon and we’re going to start to see a swing back around and we’re going to find a new equilibrium, which we are starting to already see.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah, I.

Michelle Seger
Don’t think we’ve reached it yet have.

Mark Donnolo
We. We have. We haven’t reached the yet. No. No. So it’s been you know, in short, without going on in my whole economic speech, it’s been a it’s been a short one. This disequilibrium where you’ve got a shortage in supply of of of from the sellers, the sellers being people that are selling their labor. And you’ve got a and then you’ve got a short run increase in demand from the buyers that’s going to drive price up.

Mark Donnolo
So we’re seeing that war for talent. Yeah. So point number six will get deeper into this in a few minutes, but companies are doing certain things to get people. So about 52% of organizations are increasing base pay. And we’ll talk about that and some of the variables around that to reduce turnover and to get new people in about a third of organizations are offering things like sign on bonuses to get new talent.

Mark Donnolo
So they’re taking some drastic measures and we’ll dip into that in a few minutes. But the big question here, and we’re dealing with this with a lot of clients is what do you do in terms of getting your organization ready for where things are going from an omnichannel standpoint? So how do you design the right coverage model in the right roles?

Mark Donnolo
And then from a talent standpoint, what’s your value proposition? How are you going to hold on to the people that you need and how are you going to get new people without just throwing more base pay at them? And we have to start to look at how do we strengthen our messaging and our value proposition to our people about about what we offer.

Mark Donnolo
So really, really important point. And I want to take a look at a question here. Is the move to hybrid increasing sales rep capacity? In other words, with less travel, can they cover more accounts? Yes. From Steve. Yes, Steve. I mean, I think I agree with you and I think that you’re getting more efficiency because you can obviously make more video calls than you can make individual sales calls.

Mark Donnolo
So that I think that’s a big input to how do we calculate sales capacity. So when you’re doing your sales capacity model, you should have probably higher frequency or higher velocity for those hybrid roles is.

Michelle Seger
When we ask people, though not don’t make it a one for one. So if you believe you’ve saved, I’m going to make up 20 hours a week in travel time. Let’s say that’s what it was by being on a plane or driving or whatever you’re not going to get a 20 hour a week capacity change. So just remember that, right?

Michelle Seger
It’s not really going to be a one for one conservatively, mark, we usually put in about 50% depending on other activities or other things. You have the reps doing. We talked about they need to be better problem solvers and some companies are still ramping there. So we’ve gone as low as 30%, but you should see an uplift in capacity.

Michelle Seger
Yeah.

Mark Donnolo
And I think you’ve got to take a real measurement on that, that point, which is do your sales time allocation, we use sales time optimizer or whatever to use, but make sure you understand what kind of call volume or visit volume you’re getting in those hybrid roles. Don’t just guess at it. Right. And then and then update your capacity model for them.

Michelle Seger
Understand where your people are spending their time. Yeah.

Mark Donnolo
Okay. So a little bit more detail here. So on the hybrid roles, hybrid and inside are leading the way. 54% of companies increasing hybrid, 43% of companies increasing inside sales would not mention the third point yet, but 36% of companies increasing field sales. So you can see in all three of those sales categories, the numbers are up. And what’s really interesting and I love these kind of things because you can start to see what’s happening in the market overall.

Mark Donnolo
The big push in all this hiring is toward new account sellers. So you’re Dobermans, right? Or, you know, your hunters. So new accounts selling is a priority. 61% of companies are increasing new account sellers and hybrid. 50% of companies are increasing new account sellers in inside sales. And in those new accounts, sellers are primarily the outbound sellers on the inside sales.

Mark Donnolo
And in 40%, 40% of companies increase in new account sellers for field sales. So what does that say? Saying companies are looking at how do we go out and how do we get new customers, not just hold on to what we have. So companies are getting much more aggressive about hiring in those areas. So that is a key point.

Mark Donnolo
And we have this broken out by industry. If you want to get the report from us about, well, what’s happening in my industry in terms of new accounts selling, hiring, what we can tell you that as well.

Michelle Seger
Right. And we believe that one of the reasons behind that is because we’ve already talked about the hybrid is the fastest selling or fastest growing role. And people are having to your salespeople are having to learn how to connect in new ways. So going out there and getting new customers, new clients, new buyers, it’s just a whole new game.

Michelle Seger
And, you know, companies are seeing that there’s greater opportunity to go out there and and get market share. So that’s what the game is today.

Mark Donnolo
Getting new. Yep. Yep. And good point just came up again thank you for Regina the companies hiring people in other geographies for salaries that are in their home geography. So she used the example of California companies paying California pay to people in Texas and then it makes it harder for companies in Texas to compete. Right. So I’m a big free market guy, so I’m like, okay, that’s interesting.

Mark Donnolo
What does that mean in terms of, you know, competition for labor and and do California companies really need to pay California rates for Texas labor? Are they being efficient that way or you know, and I’m sure their HR Policies will say something, but could they actually pay less and still get what they need? But that’s a really good point.

Mark Donnolo
So yeah, we now break down the geographic barriers. Then you’ve got the other situation, Regina, which is California companies saying, well, okay, if you’re moving out of the Bay Area and you’re moving to Idaho, we’re not going to pay you California rates or wages anymore. Right.

Michelle Seger
There’s a real chance of.

Mark Donnolo
Seeing that happen, too.

Michelle Seger
Yeah. So interesting, Mark, I’ve got some colleagues out there and you know, we’re running a couple of people that are running global companies and have found out that a lot of the employees, as in thousands, you know, multiple a lot of people moved out of state and they didn’t even know. Now, that’s a whole nother question, not only about pay, but around tax liability and everything else.

Michelle Seger
Like what?

Mark Donnolo
It’s like we want you to come in the office next week. Well, no, I live in I live in Minnesota now.

Michelle Seger
That’s a whole nother side. No, but we’d love to hear more of your thoughts about that and what you might be facing. Oh, so now we’re going to talk about Omni and Trusted Advisor. So what we have said is that we’ve got this omnichannel growth and it’s been you know, it looks like it’s here to stay and trusted advisor status, which we know is no longer you know, it’s not just a phrase, it’s the way it is.

Michelle Seger
And let’s talk a little bit about why we thought it would be good to talk to people about that. So we know that, you know, back at the beginning of time, people didn’t go very far. Everything was pretty local. And when we talk about primarily fields, everything from the door to door salesperson to, you know, oh, gosh, back in the wild, back in the day in those old movies, they’ve got the people drive in the car, it’s in the merchant would be going into the cities.

Michelle Seger
Right. But it was field, right. And they’d be going around through fields.

Mark Donnolo
They were actually out into the field.

Michelle Seger
Out in the field. So then what we saw was that is that our with globalization, we started to see some precious for efficiencies of globalization. I mean, we were able it with planes, trains, automobiles, right. Everything getting a little closer, hiring people from different areas. We started to catalog phone orders. Gosh, those those continue today. But then we started to see a real growth of inside sales in B2B and that center of excellence where people work together in teams.

Michelle Seger
And many of you on the the on our meeting today on our roundtable will probably be familiar with that. Right. There’s bells and whistles. There’s balloons there. You know, it’s a real team environment. But then what we saw is that we had some technology innovation. Hello, internet, right? So that came about and the informed buyer writes the informed buyer, that’s the one that has talked to you.

Michelle Seger
And they’ve already talked and they’ve already researched five or six other competitors. They already know our pricing looks like, etc.. So you’ve got this evolution of trust advisor. It’s no longer about features anymore. It’s no longer about, you know, my product, but it’s what am I solving for for you? And, you know, let me explain why we’re different, what’s our value proposition?

Michelle Seger
And then we’ve got more evolution of technology and we’ve got new sales roles that started to evolve. We talked about the hybrid role, which really has been enabled by what we’re on today, like video, video conferencing and the ability to be, what, almost real, right? Like almost face to face. There’s virtual face to face, like we’re on today and tella web and then finally you’ll see how that curve just goes straight up.

Michelle Seger
Because we had the COVID acceleration, which created a lot of behavior, behavioral changes, which really was habits, right? We had to shop online. We started going to the curb. More calls were made for from in the B2B space for orders. And then even companies started to adopt and put online a self-serve ordering. So then those habits, you know, really became behaviors well ingrained.

Michelle Seger
And so we know omnichannel trusted advisor you’re to stay so why is that important to you?

Mark Donnolo
Does that mean for the sales process?

Michelle Seger
What does that mean? Right. So the legacy sales process genius may not be just like this. So this isn’t about, you know, this is the right sales process. But basically there was a couple of things going on prospecting where you go to the buyer demand creation, where the buyer comes to you. The whole role was to engage, educate and inform about your product, your features, your pricing, negotiate what that was.

Michelle Seger
Mainly it was around the pricing and then you’d win it, you know, or maybe lose it, but then deliver it, right? But that’s how it was. Now what’s happened? Who two drivers evolution technology and inform buyer. So now what we see as there’s all of this planning how we’re going to go to market and how are we going to engage people in this very crowded space of competition, the whole discovery and qualification and value proposition, it like cycles goes around and around as sellers are being asked to really think about.

Michelle Seger
What problem are we solving.

Michelle Seger
Right? And then as we get through and we’re negotiating and looking at close win, it’s not just about how much is it going to cost, but negotiation is really around what is our relationship look like? How do I continue to engage with you? How will you help me solve my problems in the future? I mean, it’s a whole different ballgame.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah. And what I think is really interesting how these these points key back to that, that evolution that you talked about Michelle. With evolutionary technology and informed buyers. So as you mentioned upfront, the buyer knows a lot more. So we don’t have to do that same level of informing. And as we’ve been talking about or alluding to along the way, omnichannel is playing a bigger role.

Mark Donnolo
So they expect to be able to get information from multiple sources. They expect to be able to make the purchase, you know, jump from one channel to the other to make the purchase. They may not even want to deal with a human right. So I keep seeing where we’re heading in the future here, which is the the salesperson who’s going to have the advantage that the seller is going to have the advantage the leader is going to have the advantage is the one that’s able to move, not just into the trusted advisor role that you were talking about, the ability to solve problems.

Mark Donnolo
Right. So that’s the one thing that’s not going to be a AI’ed or, you know, automated or offshored is the ability to solve the customer problem. So where the customer can get all this information upfront, now it’s that problem solving capability that I think is going to be the new competence and competency that differentiates organizations.

Michelle Seger
So, Mark, we’re just having a dinner and then I want to get to how this impacts people that are in payments that are dealing with incentive comp. But I want to add, we had a dinner the other night with a global client, right? They do. They offer global services and their sales leader was talking to us and said, I need, you know, see, all right.

Michelle Seger
I need my people to be able to understand what problem is it that our clients are solving for. We’re not going to win. And what we say is often the first thing that someone says you like, I’ll make up a common one that we hear all the time, which is our people are just not out there getting new.

Michelle Seger
They just keep selling more of the same because it’s easy. But that might not be the real root cause problem that might not be what they’re really solving for. And they think that they just need to put in, you know, a higher threshold, a stricter plan. You know, it’s something that causes them to push beyond. But that may not be the root cause issue at all.

Michelle Seger
You may have some coverage model or even some mismatch on your on your product and the product mix that you’re offering.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah. And at the company you mentioned, Michelle, I think is they’re huge, they’re global. I think they’re a good indicator of some of what’s happening is they they were saying if you take this sales process as an example, they’re saying our people are so used to getting the opportunity upfront and basically filling the order right. And they, you said, are and you talk about certain levels of tenure.

Mark Donnolo
He said our people at that certain level of tenure have never been in an economy where they’ve had to go out and sign business and fight for business. It’s always just come in. Right. So they’ve they’ve started at that beginning of that process that you see there. And he said they would then jump to the end like, okay, we need to sell a big deal.

Mark Donnolo
I’m going to scope out something really big. And they weren’t, as you said, getting to solving the problems. They were jumping way ahead. And he’s saying that that new skill is, look, we can you know, we’ve got a lot of marketing. We’ve got a lot of a lot of tentacles out in the market. When we find those opportunities, we need people that can really dig deeper and find out what is it that we’re trying to solve for that that client, for that customer.

Mark Donnolo
So, guys, this, you know, mark our words, we’ll talk about this in a year. That’s going to be a differentiator. It’s going to continue to evolve. This is a differentiator. Differentiator for companies.

Michelle Seger
That’s right, and for our incentive compensation professionals on the line. When we think about omnichannel, you need to be you will be talking to your sales leader. There’s a lot of questions, some of which I’m sure you’re already facing. But one of the big ones is what do we pay for and what do we not pay for?

Michelle Seger
So I’ve had questions around. We’ve got the self-service portal. Do we pay them? What if they go in a store and then they buy online? Do we pay them? You know, what should we do? So these are big questions that need to be answered and lead to.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah, I mean, it’s a great point omnichannel. So yeah. Okay. So you’ve got the omnichannel question from a compensation standpoint, you’ve got to really work back up, you know what we think of as the revenue roadmap. So you’ve got to work further upstream and answer some of these bigger questions, which is how do you want the customer experience to operate?

Mark Donnolo
And so the customer, you know, we might want them to engage how they want to engage, when they want to engage, where they want to engage and so we’ve got to look at the natural process, right? So we were working with a retailer right now. So they sell retail through the store and you can buy online, right. Or you can also call over the phone.

Mark Donnolo
Well, there’s some gaps in between there. So somebody goes out to buy something at their retail store and they go great, I think I want to buy this. Can I go online and just purchase it? Well, then the salesperson puts pressure on on the customer to purchase it in the retail store because there’s not a clean transition to omnichannel for that customer to be able to move to the right situation.

Mark Donnolo
Or or can I call online? Right. Same kind of gap. So how do we smooth out the customer experience? And when we talk about channel neutrality with an omnichannel, we’re talking about it both from the customer standpoint and the seller standpoint. So big, you know, first big question, what does the customer experience need to look like? Second big question, how do what does the salesperson experience need to look like?

Mark Donnolo
So I want that salesperson to feel or probably want that salesperson to feel channel neutral. So sure, I helped you out on the store. Just go online at xyz.com and you can make that purchase. Right. Okay. So some companies are doing a little wonky stuff, right? They’re saying, well, sure, you can go online, you’re just enter this code and I’ll get credit for it.

Mark Donnolo
Right? So enter this code. So it tags my, my involvement in the sale. Right. So then we have to figure out how do we actually do that, crediting how to do the compensation. Your simplest way obviously would be to credit everybody for everything, but then you’re going to get a lot of inefficiency. Which brings up the third question how do we not multiply our cost of sales?

Mark Donnolo
So three big questions around omnichannel sales, but there are a lot of complexities. But again, starting with the customer experience and working through the salesperson experience and then the motivators and the cost of sales. So yeah, so big, big consideration. We’re now going to try to solve it. Obviously right here because it’s unique for every company, but plenty of considerations.

Michelle Seger
And I actually I think that this is a great piece of information for you to take back to your organization as you’re facing the same challenge. Right. So you’re going to have your CFO, you probably finance and sales and who knows, maybe marketing in the room. But basically, you know, going through that and answering those questions will help drive the solution, don’t you think?

Mark Donnolo
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think I think the you know, the consistent factor in in those kind of questions is with sales compensation, almost everything starts further back up the revenue roadmap and starts further back upstream in terms of what is our strategy, what are our c-level goals, how do we want that to flow into our coverage model, how we want that to flow into our sales process and our customer experience?

Mark Donnolo
And then how does that look when it comes out with compensation in the end? So everything does connect together. That’s why compensation, I find, is one of the great, you know, geeky connection points for everything it is in the sales management.

Michelle Seger
Everybody pays attention to it that’s for sure.

Michelle Seger
No matter what they do. So if anyone’s not familiar with the revenue roadmap, I think many of you are it’s it’s one of our our foundational pieces. You can find them at salesglobe.com and Mark has it right there.

Mark Donnolo
It’s one of our laminate.

Michelle Seger
So pretend it’s it’s in back of us. We can pretend you just pulled it out of the wall or something anyway. Okay.

Mark Donnolo
So good point. All right. So let’s dig a little bit further into the thing that we referred to earlier in that storyline is attracting and retaining talent. So the question comes up, what are companies doing to retain talent? What are companies doing to attract talent? And the answers are not all that surprising, but the answers are somewhat concerning as well.

Mark Donnolo
So stopping turnover, these are the top actions that companies are taking. This is across industries. And again, we’ve got this cut by industry as well. So if you say what’s happening in tech or healthcare or whatever, we can answer those questions for you. 52% of companies are increasing base pay to hold on to people. Okay. Well, that’s kind of obvious.

Mark Donnolo
No brainer, right? 42% of companies are increasing incentives. And I think it’s 24% of companies that are doing both increase on base and an increase in incentives. And you’ve got a 29% of companies offering greater than 200% of target incentive upside in their incentive plan. So 200% in addition to their target, their target incentive. And I’ll come back to this in a second, 37% offering hybrid work.

Mark Donnolo
Okay. So you can. And now this is really funny when you talk about sales or in addition, because sales organizations have been hybrid for years. No. I mean, how many salespeople actually come and sit in the office? There’s some companies where they do, but that’s not an unusual thing, although about a quarter offering remote work and about a quarter offering enhanced reward and recognition.

Mark Donnolo
Okay. And I’ll come back to some of these comments, but that’s for stopping turnover. And then I want to go to the next one here, which is what are they doing to acquire new talent? Okay. Similar types of numbers, 50% offering higher based pay, 39% offering higher incentives. Then you see signing bonuses by about a third offering signing bonuses about a third offering hybrid work, and then about a little over a quarter offering remote work.

Mark Donnolo
Okay. So quiz question for everybody and you don’t have to answer, but kind of think of this. I know it was like quiz question. So we all like the Cosmo quiz. That’s what this question is. And what if.

Michelle Seger
I get it.

Mark Donnolo
Right? You get a sense of pride and accomplishment.

Michelle Seger
Okay?

Mark Donnolo
It’s all about the ego. Okay. What’s wrong with hiring and offering higher base power as base salaries, higher base pay? What’s offering what’s wrong with offering higher base pay? You don’t have to add to that. Okay. Didn’t I mentioned earlier econ one on one, this is a short run problem. This disequilibrium in supply and demand in the labor market is a short run problem due to what’s happening with the number of people in the workforce, the people that are, you know, the the the departures of the quitters, what do we call them now?

Mark Donnolo
The lifestylers. This is a short term problem. What you’re doing is you’re committing a long term or you’re committing to a long term or long run solution for a short run problem once offer those higher based salaries that higher based pay, you’re stuck with that for some period of time. Right. And so then there are only three things you can do as a result of that, right?

Mark Donnolo
So you can either increase quotas or you can decrease costs somewhere else, or you can increase the price of your product. And inherent in increasing quotas is increasing productivity. Right. So if you don’t do one of those three things and somebody else will probably find a fourth one, that’s fine as well would be great. But if you don’t do one of those three things, you’re going to be losing margin, right?

Mark Donnolo
So your committing in that base pay decision to a long term solution for a short run problem. Why not put what you can into performance pay or into incentives? I realize you have to do some increase in base pay to be competitive in the market. And in fact, okay, we can see our short run problem starting to just show up now.

Mark Donnolo
Right. So was it Twitter the other day, laid off half the organization Facebook today or Meta maybe they’ll go back to Facebook is now going to be doing significant layoffs. So we’re already starting to see a problem. See that happening. Right. So the short run is already starting to show itself. And now we’re going to be sitting with a lot of companies that are overpaying and overcommitting.

Michelle Seger
Okay. Interesting is for the first time I’m hearing, because it’s being CEOs are actually coming out and saying, get rid of the dead weight. I didn’t really say that before. But now, you know, they’re they’re looking at that. And then the other unintended consequence, Mark, has been pay compression. So, you know, the difference between people that are highly experienced and those that are not that pay is getting, you know, compressed.

Michelle Seger
And that’s created an unintended consequence is that companies are having to face as well.

Mark Donnolo
Oh yeah we’re seeing that company by company. We do a lot of we do a lot of competitive benchmarking. Yeah. And as we go and talk to different companies, many, many of them are saying that, they’re saying are people that have been here for a couple or three years or four years. They’re being surpassed by new hires that are less experienced and that’s causing a problem.

Mark Donnolo
And we’re having to make adjustments again, more long term commitment to a short term problem. Yep. So I see somebody commented here already happened. Yeah. Bingo. So okay. So there you go. So so that’s what’s happening right now in terms of attracting, retaining. So think back on that last storyboard that we talked about just just as a final comment on this in that you’ve got to look at your employee value proposition.

Mark Donnolo
So when we talk about doing the competitive benchmarking, one thing we’re hearing from companies is, hey, we’re not going to just pay more because we have something different in terms of culture or we have something different in terms of the work life balance or the lifestyle or what we do as a company, the affiliation with our brand, whatever it might be.

Mark Donnolo
So companies are looking at what’s our total value proposition, so, so don’t just go for the go for the base pay. Yep.

Michelle Seger
Okay. So let’s move on to incentive compensation and what the big story was coming out of the survey. So the first one is that plans, they are very specific and focused. And what that means is that we’re looking at 2 to 3 measures in a plan, which is what we consider a best practice when you’ve got too many measures in there, people tend to lose focus, right?

Michelle Seger
And then because you weight those measures, more than likely, it just, you know, creates it dilutes the importance of your most important priorities. So 71% of companies, three quarters are using 2 to 3 measures in their plan and that was, what, 56% in 2020? But that’s simply because during the pandemic, we saw people going down to maybe one measure.

Michelle Seger
It was just a strange time and people weren’t sure what they could measure. They didn’t want to hold their teams accountable for profit, for example. They were just out there to get what they could get. The other thing that we’re seeing is when we look at the sales roles, we’re starting to see revenue being used more frequently as one of the key measures in the plan.

Michelle Seger
So when we think about people selling, if I’m a new acquisition hunter, a lot of times they’re being asked to focus on bookings, so go out there and just close that deal. But now companies are becoming a little cost sensitive and for other reasons as well. They’re starting to get more focused on the revenue that’s coming in. And so we’re seeing that and we’re also seeing a profit, gross profit showing up in the plans.

Michelle Seger
And we’re being asked about that pretty frequently. I would say this year, Mark, the question has come should we add profit in, even if it’s just like a 20% weighting in the plan to provide a little bit of focus? And then I guess all we’ll say about that, because you’re going to spend more time on this, is when we at the bookings measure, we’re seeing that TCV total contract value and ACV annual contract value, those are the most likely used methods to determine what the pay what the value of the deal looks like.

Michelle Seger
So the other big news is, which might not be big news for any of you, but maybe you would like to know that your colleagues and peers out there, everyone is still struggling with how do we set quotas in the next coming year? So there’s still a continued supply chain. Now there’s economic uncertainty, there are layoffs. There are people being hired.

Michelle Seger
There is are people going to work in the office or remote, and there’s changes in what the needs are from in the B2B space. So again, we’re looking at a lot of factors that are impacting quotas as well.

Mark Donnolo
And I want to mention if we go back for one sec, cause there’s this one point here, individual versus team measures, that’s another big dynamic we’re seeing shifting as well.

Michelle Seger
I skipped right over that, did not.

Mark Donnolo
Do that or I’m repeating myself, which I do all the time.

Michelle Seger
So you’re right and what’s very interesting is during the pandemic, we had a lot of our clients even coming back to us, but they showed up in the survey and they went to more of a regional country team level goal setting because it was easier and they thought it kind of, you know, the bigger the number, the easier it is to achieve to it over a greater mass.

Michelle Seger
Right. Opposed to being so specific. But there was push back even at the individual seller level. So companies are working to get back to that individual measure. The individual seller wants it and the company does as well.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that that is an interesting shift that we’re seeing going back toward individual just for all the reasons you outline. But that’s one of those things. I’m like, Wow, isn’t that cool that people really do want more individual accountability as well? Yeah. Okay, so let’s go on to the next point story and plan. Governors, I’m not supposed to talk about the election or governors, so we’re not going to talk about that.

Mark Donnolo
We’re gonna talk about governors for the plan that’s open. So there is a general trend here that we’re seeing in terms of during the pandemic, things like caps and thresholds came off plan. So companies are saying we want you to be able to earn earlier, we’re going to take the thresholds away. We want you to be able to earn the upside if you can get it.

Mark Donnolo
We’re going to take the caps away. So things opened up. Those governors removed from from the plans. And then what we’re seeing now is a shift from 2021 to 2022 in the following year. So caps are reducing to some degree now, we’re not big fans of caps here at SalesGlobe. We think about caps kind of like free range chickens, right?

Mark Donnolo
So you got this chicken sitting in a very small cage in that very small cages is the pay cap. Right. And that that little very small cage is kind of depressing because it kind of influences how I perform as a chicken. Right. So so that’s our pickup. But you want a free range chicken, you want somebody who’s positive.

Mark Donnolo
And when you when you talk to two people about a compensation plan and they talk about the cap on the plant, we don’t like the black cap and the plane. You asking the question? Well, have you ever hit the cap? No, I never hit the cap. But I know a guy that hit the cap. It was a couple of years ago.

Mark Donnolo
Right. So so nobody so the cap is more psychological. So back to the free range chicken thing. I’d rather have a free range chicken that has aspiration. Right. I want somebody who’s who’s who wants to go out there and blow out the plan because like the free range chicken, we know there’s a fence out there somewhere, right? There’s a natural limitation to how far we can go.

Mark Donnolo
So the cap is hugely psychological, so so those are starting to pare off a little bit, but other things are coming along. Bloomberg and megadeal policies increasing a little bit you’ll see. So that’s that’s those unforeseen deals are huge deals where we take them outside of the plan remaining even as is thresholds for hunters and you can see that’s holding even from year to year and also your thresholds from fire for farmers holding even year to year.

Mark Donnolo
We could talk separately about why use thresholds, but those are holding pretty consistent and then regressive payouts are increasing as well. Let’s swing by theirs and see that. Okay, so progressive payouts are increasing as well. Regressive payouts are basically when you get to that excellence level, they start the effective commission rate starts to slow down on the plan.

Mark Donnolo
So so it’s slowing down the payouts. So that’s kind of like a soft cap in a way. Yeah, right. So that’s a little bit what’s happening on plan governors.

Michelle Seger
All right. So let’s get into the plan measures. This is where this came from. So we went across industry and this is also for your field and hybrid sales roles. It was an the inside sales is in here too. So whether I’m doing account acquisition, account management or I’m doing both that we grouped in all the different jobs together.

Michelle Seger
So what we found is top performance measure across all three areas. So whether I’m a hunter, a Doberman or I’m out there doing count management, penetrating accounts or I’m doing both, revenue appears to be the number one measure. It’s number 52 call it. You know, it was 62 on acquisition in management. So call it more than half of companies are using that as the top measure in their plan.

Michelle Seger
Secondly is coming in bookings, right. So that’s when I book that order and then gross profit as a third measure with 39 and you know, about 35% of companies using that as well. So that’s just a little bit of a breakdown. And again, as Mark said, we’ve got this broken out by industry and by job role as well.

Michelle Seger
But we want to aggregate this to show you what it looks like.

Mark Donnolo
So a question came in from one of the viewers on, are we seeing compensation on price increase at all? Price increase? And that would be kind of inherent in revenue.

Michelle Seger
But so it hits in revenue, but also on gross profit. And that was the question that came back to us, which was if I can if I’m understanding the question, right, because you’re looking up and I never know what his thinking was looking up. But anyway, what one of the questions that have come back to us is if I can give them control across the price that they offer.

Michelle Seger
So they’ve got, you know, a starting and then a higher price. Obviously, that higher price brings in greater margin for the company. And the thought was, you know, should we could pay them for that spread, right? So the answer is yes, we are seeing some of that. However, Europe has to be in control of that and it has to be realistic, right?

Michelle Seger
Yeah.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah. And probably the most common measure that I think I’m seeing on price increases is price realization. So it’s a target price and. How close can you get to that target price if you don’t like you said, Michelle, if the rep does have control over price and margin, or even if they don’t, one of our clients said recently that our reps are our best our customers best negotiators.

Mark Donnolo
I mean, they’ll come back and tell us why we need to lower the price for the customer. Right. So so that would say the reps not highly impacted or were compensated for price in that situation? Yeah, good question.

Michelle Seger
So the other thing is we just wanted to bring up a consideration point because we’re being asked this a lot as well, whether you’re paying on bookings or that’s where it starts. But then it’s like, okay, how do we measure what what the value looks like? And it starts with contracts. And then you’ve got though we mentioned that TCV and ACV are being used most frequently for bookings by companies in this study.

Michelle Seger
But then you’ve got MRR monthly recurring revenue. And how long should that be paid out volume in units? It could be whether it’s new business versus renewals, do we pay for renewals and how much? And then one time sales, right. There’s all these different things you need to be thinking about in bookings and revenue and get very specific on how that’s defined and make sure that’s communicated very well in your plan and very well defined for the sales reps so they know what they’re going after.

Mark Donnolo
Yeah. Yeah. And I think one of the biggest challenges that I see in this area is that we’re trying to align the SAS payment with what used to be the the perpetual license or the premise payment. And the other one is the concern about annuity. So I don’t want to create something that’s going to be a long term annuity that people are just going to continue to earn that money over and over and over as long as we have the account.

Mark Donnolo
Because what it starts to do is it starts to offset the the new customer selling. So you’ve got questions about what are the right roles. I’m not going to sleep. Swing over here for a second. What’s the timing of your payout? So when you when you’re doing your TCV or your ACV, how much of that are you paying at the time of the deal?

Mark Donnolo
How much of that are you paying a year in or it’s certain certain points? Who’s eligible, eligible for RPN responsibility, like I mentioned, retention, penetration, and new customer acquisition responsibility. And then finally rules of engagement. So how does the team work together? So again, going back to the revenue roadmap, the answer to a lot of the the SAS questions is going to be how do we want that that sales process, those rules of engagement, the sales strategy to work?

Michelle Seger
That’s exactly right. So as you’re thinking about, you know, you’re being asked to solve or a plan, you’re being asked to create a plan around everything as a servicem or as a service. There are these other questions that need to be answered. And this is, again, I think, a good tool, Mark, to get the conversation going with sales and finance and those you need to get their buy in.

Mark Donnolo
Let me bring up another question here. Any thoughts on how to attach value to bookings for hunters in a consumption based SAS? Yes. The challenge with a consumption based SAS model for a hunter is that we have some kind of soft commitment from the customer that we’re going to use your product or use your service to a certain level, but we don’t really know what that level is going to be until we get some time further out.

Mark Donnolo
If you have a true hunter or a true Doberman, you don’t necessarily want them hanging around and babysit in the account for a year to see what that consumption level comes in at. One good solution, and there are a number, but one good solution that I liked was a company we worked with that had two different sales organizations.

Mark Donnolo
One was a software based organization where they sold an actual license, the other was a service based organization that was SAS in nature. And what they found was the software based license organization. People would get paid on billings. They’d work all the way to the end of the year. They worked through the holidays because they knew a bookings.

Mark Donnolo
I’m sorry if I booked something I would get credit for it. Right. The other organization, the consumption based organization, was paid on revenue or actual billings. Well, the consumption based organization, they were enjoying the holidays in a different way there. They were going home because they’re like, well, if I sell something in December, it doesn’t matter because I’m not going to see any any revenue or billings come through from it anyway.

Mark Donnolo
So what they did, being good analytical people, is they figured out what is the typical percentage of committed consumption from the customer that will come in because they had such a history of that. And what level can we actually commit to the salesperson paying them? So it actually turns it into a pseudo bookings measure and it changed totally changed the behavior of the organization.

Mark Donnolo
And because it was financially modeled well, they didn’t lose money off of it. It was highly predictable. Yep.

Michelle Seger
So like you said earlier, that might not be the answer for your company. Whoever asked this question, it was a great solution for that business. So we can, you know, we’d be happy to talk further about that. But there’s a lot of answers out there and they’re out there. It’s just a matter of figuring out the one, the right one for your business.

Michelle Seger
So a little bit about M&A, because we said that over half of the companies that were involved in the study were part of M&A over the past 12 months. And so, you know, we’ve got one, two, three, four, five, six top challenges are the top three role definition alignment across the organizations. And we hear this time and time again.

Michelle Seger
So we had, you know, about 80% of companies saying that that was the top challenge. And I focused in Mark on enterprise companies here because for M&A, it’s more prevalent on the larger companies, how big those challenges really are with a smaller company that might have five people buying, you know, in and there might be two more joining the challenge may be a little bit less.

Michelle Seger
So we want to get a get some good solid representation incentive compensation alignment that’s everything from the pay philosophy to what the measures are used that people are paid on to the timing. You know, that is a big challenge as well. And then a big one we see that we’re solving for all the time is total target compensation and pay levels across the organization.

Michelle Seger
So gosh, I remember I still recall our global client that, you know, it was they offered on prem bought a software company and their inside sales team at that the premise product was fairly entry level and they acquired company. Their AI inside sales organization was extremely sophisticated. In fact, their pay rivaled that of the field sales of the other company that was acquiring them and that was a highly compensated role.

Michelle Seger
Well, they immediately started to see Fallout where people were leaving the company and they couldn’t figure out why the company that that they had acquired and they found out, you know, rumor mill. Right. Chatter at the chatter at the cooler and beyond. They thought that their roles were going to be diminished. So they started going to the competitor.

Michelle Seger
So, you know, there are other issues around integrating the sales organization and cultural differences, aligning the performance expectations. Again, that gets around to the culture of the company and what they expect. But, you know, I think the the big one here is get your role definition alignment across the organization set and everyone bought into that before you even tackled the other things.

Michelle Seger
That’s what would be one of our lessons learned on that. And when we talk about and think about what the expectations are from an acquisition and so there’s three, three big ones usually that we see and a couple of them fall into the sales organization. So cost synergy when we think about sales, that’s reducing the overall cost. By combining the companies, a lot of times they’re thinking they can leverage best practices, they can leverage what’s best or cost the companies.

Michelle Seger
Maybe they’re their structure and model that they have. Revenue synergies would be things around cross-sell, the ability to put products together, bring new products to the market, and grow your market share by having both companies take advantage of what the other company has to offer. And then, of course, capital synergies, right? So what kind of buildings and things that they have in place.

Michelle Seger
And then, you know, when we think about the outcomes that depend on sales revenue, big challenges, we know that you got cross-selling, new product solutions, bundles, geographic expansion and segment and sector expansion. And then the cost synergies we see around sales capacity improvement. Again, I talked about leveraging best practices, the belief that there can be a headcount reduction at some point and streamline processes.

Michelle Seger
So the big morning here is that or the big thing to be thinking about is 20% of that revenue synergy, synergy potential. It’s typically put on cross-selling, but yet less than 20% of companies actually achieve that cross-sell goal. So there’s a lot to be thinking about in as we delve into the root causes, why it goes back to that role alignment and the setting expectations of people understanding what it is that they need to do.

Mark Donnolo
You know, it’s funny, Michelle, the the biggest barrier that we hear on cross-selling is risk. It’s not like we’re going to throw more spin offs or more incentives of somebody to cross-sell products of a company that’s been acquired. It’s it’s the person says, hey, I don’t know how how good those products are that I’m selling, how reliable those services are.

Mark Donnolo
I’ve got a really strong relationship. And in my best accounts, I don’t want to put that at risk. And, you know, if I’m going to introduce somebody new as a person into the account to sell with me, well, that’s a risk as well. So risk is the single biggest factor in in the single biggest thing that companies look for for synergies in an acquisition, which is cross-selling.

Michelle Seger
Yep. So you got any questions on that or you need some help around that? We’re here to help now with that.

Mark Donnolo
Awesome. So that’s what we have for today. A couple of action items for you. We have the Rethink Sales podcast, which is on Spotify and Apple. You can check out we have a ton of great podcasts out there on all sorts of different topics. We have books, as we mentioned before, some great practices and and call us, email us if you need advice.

Mark Donnolo
You need some ideas, you need some help making something happen, whether it’s a significant transformation or it’s focusing specifically on your sales compensation program, we we’d love to help you solve the problems of. Thanks, everybody, for joining us.

Michelle Seger
Thanks a lot. And we really appreciate you time out of your day to spend with us. We hope this was enjoyable for you and that you learned something new.

Mark Donnolo
Thanks, everybody. Have a great week.