Reinventing Sales: Outbound Selling, Incentive Compensation, Tech Innovations & Why You Should Care

Michelle Seger
Welcome to the Rethink Sales Podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Seger. And today, we have with us an expert in sales performance management technologies, Edward Moss, who works with
OpenSymmetry. Edward is a consultant who works with companies across industries globally to help them determine the right technology to support their needs and to optimize the value they receive out of their sales performance technology.

Michelle Seger
Once an investment has been made today, we’re going to have a great conversation with Edward about the continuously sales landscape and the interaction between buyers and sellers. We’ll also talk about sales performance management systems and how they can really enable the S.R.O. to make the right purchasing decision to support their business and their needs. And we would be remiss if we did not discuss the impact that AI is having in improving the outcomes that are possible to provide performance, visibility and support from leadership to front line sales.

Michelle Seger
Edward, thank you so much for being here with us today.

Edward Moss
My pleasure.

Michelle Seger
I’m really glad I know that we’ve been looking forward to this time. It’s taken us a while and I just thought, you know, I wanted to just explore something with you and which is you live over in the U.K., I think outside of London proper, I believe. But could you talk to people a little bit about your work and where it brings you?

Michelle Seger
Because I find that your travels bring you interesting places and your work is really interesting as well.

Edward Moss
Absolutely. So you’ve been fooled slightly by my British accent. Michelle and I live it live in Rotterdam these days, so I look after clients in the whole of Europe, Middle East and Africa. So largely in the U.K., though, there are a couple in the Netherlands and a couple in South Africa and a couple in the Middle East as well.

Edward Moss
So that that’s where they start.

Michelle Seger
So tell me something about the climate in some of these countries right now, if you wouldn’t mind. So I’m just thinking about, you know, the economic outlook, how people are feeling in the post-pandemic, but yet with some lingering effects are you finding that there’s any regional nuances or what people are thinking about or concerned about these days?

Edward Moss
MM I have a very interesting question. I think in general I’ve noticed slightly more risk averse behavior and I think there’s obviously local and geopolitical issues that play into that. And I think South Africa obviously has had some challenges in the last couple of years, and that’s naturally affecting the business environment there as well. And I think in Europe, we’re rebounding from the pandemic well.

Edward Moss
And I think, you know, when you when you challenge is really is the the norm of hybrid working instead of everyone being in the office all the time.

Michelle Seger
Hmm. Okay. So that leads into the really interesting conversation that you and I had and that we want to explore, which is how the sales landscape is changing. You just mentioned and I want to get a little bit deeper into the hybrid work world, but things have changed. We forced people basically, we asked them right to work remotely for 18 months or so, and there’s this slow coming back into an office environment.

Michelle Seger
When I think about business to business sales or just people in general, right? And, you know, my prediction is we’re going to end up with a three day workweek in office. You know, normal working. But but probably three days in, that’s just my bet. I could be wrong. Ask me a year from now. But I was really wondering about, you know, and wanted to talk to you about how the impact of the pandemic and technology and the fast evolution or quickly upon the what we’re calling the fourth industrial Revolution and how that’s impacting the sales landscape.

Michelle Seger
And you that’s where you live. So I’d love to hear what your perspective is and what you’re hearing out there.

Edward Moss
Mm hmm. And that’s an interesting perspective. I think if we look at that coming back to the office, I think three to a week is probably going to be the happy medium that most people want, allows them to receive parcels and look after kids a couple of days a week. But also getting that that community vibe, which quite a lot of us actually want from a workplace, we want to strive together with like minded individuals to achieve a goal.

Edward Moss
And doing that together in post just somehow feels a lot better than doing that. On a video call with someone. So. So maybe the next time I, I have to take the plane over and but I think yeah, I think that’s probably had today. I think there’s obviously been big backlashes when companies have tried to force people back into the office all the time.

Edward Moss
I think that will change by different businesses where we will require people to be in the office more. And I think it has perhaps opened up a big bit of a cleft between jobs where you can work remotely and jobs where you can’t work remotely. That wasn’t there before and that wasn’t the expectation. So I think in the long term that will probably settle out and people will be able to choose to go into careers in professions where hybrid working is a possibility.

Edward Moss
If that’s something that is important to them. But in the short term, I think that is going to cause some issues where some jobs that really need to be on site reading the pages are going to be really hard done by, but they’re not getting that an additional perk that so many of us have enjoyed over them over the last couple of years.

Michelle Seger
Yeah, it’s certainly been so interesting to me that the the big conversation with businesses where people are going to work from the employee and the employer standpoint and, you know, more and more I am starting to see at the sea level where they’re starting to come around to discussing the rationale really. And I think that employees, many of them anyway, are understanding that as well.

Michelle Seger
I mean, from our perspective, I can say that there is definitely you can call it magic, but it’s the natural human interaction that just seems to spark more creativity and, you know, which is important in our work when we’re identifying the solutions. So yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what happens. But we think also, I don’t know what you’ve seen, Edward, but there’s a certain sharpness that you have to when you’re interacting with others that you know tends to go a little bit to the wayside.

Michelle Seger
If you’re strictly working from home. And I’m I’m actually speaking from the perspective of of being a consultant and how I interact with leaders. I actually had someone say to me recently, you know, it’s kind of odd. I got out of practice and I didn’t even realize it. You know, when you’re on video versus in person.

Edward Moss
Yeah, that’s really interesting. I think we are at least that I’m certainly do my best thinking in conversation. And if I’m I in those little conversations and there’s collision of ideas with people doing slightly different things doesn’t exist in the same way. So I think, yeah, there’s certainly something from a creativity point which I think is lost when people work remotely for a long time.

Edward Moss
But I think sharpness is a really interesting one, is not something I’ve contemplated a lot on, but I can certainly see how having that and potentially it’s a delay and feedback that you get when you’re communicating over and message instead of communicating face to face leads to a lack of sharpness. A really interesting perspective.

Michelle Seger
So let’s talk about what you’re seeing in how buyers and salespeople are engaging. So how is the expectation of the buyer changing and what does that really mean for a sales organization and for the individual salesperson?

Edward Moss
Is there the expectation of meeting face to face is not always there. Quite often buyers organizations are dispersed as well, so most of the work we do at OpenSymmetry is software implementation. So that is historically something that we would like to do on site, have to face to face and really make sure we’re understanding what’s going on.

Edward Moss
But the buyer expectation now is that happens remotely. And so that’s that’s something that we’re really pushing forward to try and get back on on site because we do believe, as you say, there are benefits to being on site and having those discussions face to face and I think perhaps a lot of that is confirming understanding. And but I think also from a seller angle, one of the things that we have seen is almost counterintuitively, the requests to meet up and seem to have not as part of a project, but to as part of user groups where you’re creating the sense of community have been more successful.

Edward Moss
So bringing people together in London, we’ve had some really successful user groups bringing people together, which I’m not sure would have been such a success before the pandemic. And and I think part of that is yeah, and I think part of that is because people have more control over their encountered this. And I think that’s the other thing that perhaps is sometimes missed is not just at home, at office, but I think it’s also control over the calendars, which is changed a little bit as well.

Edward Moss
And that’s moved more over to the individuals. So these events where they can they really see value in which might be face to face, they are turning up much more readily to. And so I think I think that’s certainly something we’re seeing from from our side that.

Michelle Seger
So I know that you work with sales organizations of different sizes across the world, across the globe. And, you know, one of the things that we had discussed, we were already pre-pandemic looking at, you know, the sales shifting from transactional to more of a solution sale. We already know with the evolution of technology that information is in the hand of the buyer, more so control of the buyer and you know, what I’m what I’m really thinking about in this hybrid world is, you know, what do you believe and what are you hearing is required out of salespeople, you know, in how they work with their buyers that may be different or maybe something that was.

Michelle Seger
aspiration, but it’s really become more like table stakes or requirements today.

Edward Moss
MM I think you’re absolutely right to say that buyers are more informed before ever getting in contact with a salesperson. And I think that what that does is it raises the bar for what a salesperson needs to bring to the conversation in terms of value. And I think something we have seen is that that makes outbound sales much more tricky.

Edward Moss
And so outbound sales really has to be well-equipped with really top notch marketing to be successful. So all of has to be a social sort of presence behind it to have some success there. So I think that’s one thing we’ve seen is that that value that the salesperson has to bring has been has increased. And with that the seller has to ask to work out how they’re going to be able to provide that.

Edward Moss
And so it’s not just knowing the high level information of what that product does and being that arbiter of the information, it’s actually perhaps getting more and getting more technical, more understanding of the actual product they’re selling or using their internal teams earlier in the sales cycle than perhaps they would have done And previous thing. I think perhaps the other challenge there is, you know, building, building trust requires time and multiple contact points and I think but now more information is gathered out front by the by the potential buyer.

Edward Moss
But it means that there are less of these contact points that that happened during a sale side. And that can mean that from a sales side, it feels like sometimes sales perhaps are getting more transactional than and then than they would be otherwise.

Michelle Seger
One of the things that I thought was really interesting and one of the points that you’ve discussed with me is this whole thing around client satisfaction shifting towards, I call it more experiential. So you were talking about, you know, it creates this challenge for marketing. Brochures just aren’t going to cut it any more on that type of information.

Michelle Seger
But demos, trials, things like that can be a good differentiator. So can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Edward Moss
Absolutely. Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. There’s got to and I think it’s really plays on this this loss aversion effect and trying to get the potential buyer to believe that they have this thing because it once they have the listing to say, well, you only have it if you buy it, then it makes them much more likely to buy it.

Edward Moss
I think, you know, the classic example it’s been around for years is the impact of test drives on buying a car. If you if you test drive the car, you are a lot more likely to buy the car. And a lot of that comes through the fact that, okay, perhaps you are more serious about buying the car if you take it for a test drive.

Edward Moss
But still, having taken that into account, it seems to be a lot of it is actually. You can imagine now what it’s like to have that car. And then if you don’t buy that car, you don’t have it. And yes, it’s this feeling of loss which is so much more powerful than not doing it. So I think you’re absolutely right.

Edward Moss
More experience around your Craigslist experience makes people feel like they have it, like they can’t lose it. And the ways to do that are exactly, as you say, interactive content videos. If you’re not comfortable with interactive content. And obviously there are some risks with interactive contact. And, you know, I come from a software world and even the most user friendly software, the first time you use it and there’ll be teething pains where you think, where do I click this way?

Edward Moss
Do I click this? And that’s perhaps not the experience you want to give a buyer on their own and still, you know, that needs to be some kind of a component that to help them through that process. And but yeah, I think you’re absolutely right that that’s such an interesting.

Michelle Seger
You know, one of the things that when I think about the go to market and changing go to market I was really interested to ask you about this. We are starting to see clients shifting how they segment and go to market. So traditionally where you may have a product focus or product and service focus and you’re aligning your teams to that, which I still believe that’s a good that’s a good way to go, right?

Michelle Seger
Because some people are, you know, when you’ve got focus on products and services, you’re not having to worry about 600 SKUs. It’s a whole lot easier. But what we’re starting to see is I’ll call it industry vertical ization focus. And what we’re starting to see is that clients are exploring and trying to understand in the B2B sales world.

Michelle Seger
So and I would imagine B2C as well is different client types, customer end user or customer types, but different business types. We’re starting to see let’s bring up, you know, health care versus food services, right? Or manufacturing. We’re starting to see them exploring, putting together even teams of people that have different product focus that can service that particular industry, whereas traditionally it was more of a product go to market focus.

Michelle Seger
And so I don’t know if you’re starting to see any industries specialization, but, you know, I think there’s pros and cons to that as well too. When we think about just the sales structure and rules of engagement. But I’d love to hear what you’re seeing out there and what your thought is.

Edward Moss
I think it’s a really interesting one. I think the I think the key thing to bring into conversation here is, is reputation and customer satisfaction that we touched on earlier. I think there is a risk when you have a successful product in one industry bringing it into a different industry, because historically when perhaps less information was available publicly, it didn’t.

Edward Moss
It wasn’t such a risk because people in this industry weren’t aware of what’s happening in the other industry. But now that quite a lot of reviews are online and going into a new industry can be the is not just risking, am I going to be successful in this new industry, It also risks the other industry you’re already part of because of those online rave reviews and the enhanced power of reputation.

Edward Moss
So I think we will see products focus more on specific industries where they think they can really provide the most value and if they are going into different industries, some kind of saturation of brands to some extent to to reduce, reduce that potential at risk.

Michelle Seger
So one of the other things and then I want to talk about the workforce workplace evolution. One of the other things that, you know, I would be interested in hearing your take on is omni channel. When we think about B2B sales, right? So in B2C omni channel and you know, it’s now mainstream, right? People are buying any way that they wish.

Michelle Seger
I am. I’m doing a lot of my holiday shopping that I know that I can. It’s for me, it’s now just what I do. It’s not even a learning anymore. I’m choosing some online. I’m choosing some to go into a retail store in the B2B sales, where do you see omni channel playing right now? I know that sales leaders were thinking about, you know, we need to have more of a B2C experience in the B2B sales world.

Michelle Seger
So what are you hearing or seeing out there that may substantiate or not that believe?

Edward Moss
I think that’s a really interesting hypothesis. I would ask, how do you think that when you’re interacting with businesses as a customer, how are you finding the omni channel experience? How are you finding out?

Michelle Seger
So what we’re finding is that they’re they’re struggling with how to pay for online sales because it depends, right? So in our retail channel, you know, you can see where that plays out really well, where a client may go into I’ll bring up a really easy example of a sale that could happen at 1 a.m.. I go into a mattress store and maybe three or four times and, you know, but I order that mattress online and I yet I’ve been in that store a few times.

Michelle Seger
And so what we’ve been focused on is in retail omni channel, which we believe is table stakes. Don’t create friction for your client, but how do you take friction out of the sale? And we have our own ways of dealing with of recommending what companies can do. So when I say friction, I know that some retail chains have withinside sales because the listening to calls, they’re really encouraging people to make that sale right there.

Michelle Seger
And in the store they’re giving people cards and coupons and numbers so that they get credit. Now, that’s a burden that you’ve now put on your buyer that we say don’t put it on the buyer. So what we asked them to consider is let’s look at all the sale, the sales opportunities in the market, pay for them all.

Michelle Seger
You’re just going to pay a different rate than if you’re just paying that. Who walks into the store, if that makes sense. So you can still manage your cost of sales, but people are still getting credit for the sale no matter where it takes place. So you arguably what your belief, the belief is in that hypothesis is that salespeople will get, you know, more sales credit, if you will, which is why you may change your rate slightly because you’ve got sales that are coming in through multiple channels potentially in the B2B world.

Michelle Seger
What we’re doing is we are we are working with clients to help them build an experience on their website. And you know, some have portals for for clients that are actually existing clients that make it a little, you know, more of an experience to the point that you made earlier. And they are giving credit to the appropriate sales role.

Michelle Seger
Who’s responsible for that particular type of product or service. And so as a result, where renewal business that, you know, is deemed as being sometimes it’s evergreen, sometimes meaning that it just goes on and on until in a lot of subscriptions, they don’t expire or it’s deemed that the sales person is not needed in the sale. We’re seeing less or no credit towards those sales because we are seeing them give credit across multiple mediums, if you will, of the sales channels.

Michelle Seger
You you know, across sales channels, I should say. So that’s kind of what we’re seeing. You know, there’s no solid answer. What we’re hearing is that they want to provide a seamless experience that doesn’t become trouble for the buyer to have to navigate through.

Edward Moss
I get I think you’re right about that. And I think obviously the cost of that is one reason why people are trying to introduce this friction, is that trying to justify and being able to show the value that they’re providing by being in store and so they’re able to make decisions. And there’s certainly a trade off there. But I think you’re absolutely right.

Edward Moss
As soon as you introduce more friction, you’re reducing total sales. So is that something you really want to do? And I think in the in the business, the business world, I think that is less less common. I think and I think you know, there are and people still like to have a single point of contact. And I think that’s really useful.

Edward Moss
And I think perhaps that that’s more walk and someone who takes overall responsibility for that account. And I think that’s what will continue to see.

Michelle Seger
To now as we keep talking about the workplace evolution, I want to think about, you know, some of the concerns. Right. And about the hybrid workforce. And one is like, well, do we believe we have a loss of productivity? Do we really know how people are performing? I’m kind of I want to ask you about, you know, the pressure that’s on leaders to have like this real time performance visibility and what are some things that they may be doing.

Michelle Seger
And then, you know, how are people continuing to develop their teams as well?

Edward Moss
So I think managing a team remotely is very different to managing it in-person. I think the amount of feedback and amount of, I guess data that you collect as an individual on the other person is a lot less when you’re sitting next to each other in an office. There’s lots of subtle things that you can pick out in a way that you can’t if you’re managing the remotely.

Edward Moss
So are they at their desk for at the allotted time? You know, simple things of it. Are they talking with the right manner on the phone and are they taking their work seriously? And I think with managing remotely, there’s this this idea of quiet quitting, which I think we’ve seen some fairly troubling statistics on in the last couple of years.

Edward Moss
And I don’t know how overblown those are, but it’s certainly something that couldn’t really happen when people were working in an office because it’s pretty obvious when and if someone’s not working and they’re supposed to be there. It’s very it’s very easy to tell. I think what you sometimes see when people start to check out now is that those days are they’re in the office used to be three it’s now it’s now one and you know they quietly turn up less and less to the office.

Edward Moss
So because they’re embarrassed about the fact that they’re there quietly quitting. So I think that’s something that managers need to take into account. I think also have a sense of community is no longer a given. And I think one of the reasons that people work for companies is that they like working with other people side to side and they feel remote and that’s you’ve got to work harder to achieve that same effect or you’re going to have to start worrying about how long someone’s going to stick around.

Edward Moss
And I think if we look at hybrid working as well in terms of the amount that you’ll tied to a specific location, I’m not very tied to a location. I don’t have to be in Rotterdam. I could work in Utrecht, I could work in any other city in the Netherlands because I don’t have to go into the office very often.

Edward Moss
And that is both a blessing and a curse for management. It means that for new roles, potentially there’s a larger pool of applicants you can look at. But it also means for people that you’ve got in your role and that it may be easier for them to move on and go elsewhere. So I think you have certainly a lot to be said for a lot of changes that have happened with managing people remotely.

Edward Moss
And and I think it be really interesting to see how that shakes out, particularly in terms of a retention point of view over the next couple of years.

Michelle Seger
What about culture? How do you and again, I’m thinking about in your role working with sales organization and beyond your working with technical teams, I realize, but how do we drive to culture and let’s say I want, you know, I’m a sales leader and we’re hearing more and more about driving to a sales culture, a sales orientation. And you know, what’s what’s behind that?

Michelle Seger
What’s behind that is that we hear a continuous frustration that there is a belief anyway, that salespeople are more focused on. Many are more focused on just retaining what they’ve got. And, you know, but again, that can be communicated in pay plans. You and I both know that. We’ll talk about pay plans later shortly. But, you know, how do they really drive to that sales culture and how do you keep whatever culture it is that you want in your organization?

Michelle Seger
How do you keep people honest and true to that in a hybrid or remote type of work environment.

Edward Moss
And so there’s a couple of things I think are foundational and I said one of which, which I think is often overlooked is belief in the thing you’re setting. And so or not even the thing you’re selling, if you’re working as part of a company and you don’t believe in what that company is doing then or why are you there, how are you going to interact with your people in a team, You’re you’re you’re not completely there if you believe in what you’re selling and this is a wonderful product, you are actually creating good in the world by selling your I am solving your problem.

Edward Moss
I am going to help you, if you will, doing well in that space. You can be a very trustworthy person if you’re selling well with a product you don’t believe in, then there’s some people that can do that. And what kind of people are they? They’re not trustworthy people. They’re psychopaths. So if you have a that’s the honesty of it, right?

Edward Moss
And so if you have a company where the sales team does not believe in the product that they are selling, then you’re going to end up with these individuals that are going to erode the trust within your organization. Then you’re going to start having processes to try and manage these difficult individuals and then you’ve eroded one of these other sort of sort of building blocks.

Edward Moss
So I’d say the first one is actually believe in what you’re doing. And then the second one is the trust between the individuals in the sales team, but also within the organization as a whole. And to do so well. So I guess those are the foundational rules. And then if I put my consultant hat on, I would say, well, the current state, future state, and how are you going to get there?

Edward Moss
And I think if we look at current state first, I think it’s really interesting for culture because our leaders often have a very different view of the world and their company than individuals might have themselves. So one way to get at that is through a survey and the other is is walking the floor. And there’s a couple of really interesting programs, sort of these reality programs where you’ve got an undercover millionaire where this he’s someone who’s run a big business and then they spend a week undercover at their own business.

Edward Moss
So no one knows who they are. And what almost always happens is that they don’t really understand what it’s like at their business. Sometimes it can be the culture can be a lot better than they expect, and sometimes it can be a lot worse than what they expect. But I think that’s also a super interesting idea and sounds unfeasible.

Edward Moss
The other good example is is Marks and Spencers in the UK who all of their management say 3800 people spend seven days working in the shops, stacking shelves and scanning people’s goods so they really understand what’s going on. And so you first really understand what’s going on, what’s the current state and the second bit is where it gets a bit more interesting is actually what are the cultures and behaviors, you know, the behaviors that you want to drive for and you’ll sales team.

Edward Moss
And that obviously varies a lot depending on where your business is. But I would argue that, you know, look at where the business strategy is and then come down to behaviors from that. And then you’ve got once you’ve got your kind of here’s where we are, here’s where we want to try and get to, you’ve got this. How do we try and get there and there’s lots of different ways to try and change behaviors.

Edward Moss
But I think two things that stick out to me as we are really ringing true is an emphasis on management. And if you’ve got, you know, people don’t leave bad companies, they leave bad managers. And if you have a good management in place, making sure your managers are well enabled and you’re hiring the right managers to start with, and that’s really going to help.

Edward Moss
And then the second one is the idea of shocking rules creating culture. So the idea that if you and as a couple of really good examples in history and for their sake, you’ve got 2003 English rugby team, the captain said you’ve got to be 5 minutes early to every meeting and if you’re not 5 minutes early, you’re late.

Edward Moss
And then that was enforced. And then the idea was to drive this sense of professionalism within the team. And for those that don’t know, the English rugby team won the World Cup in 2003 and I’ve a good one, I think. I think George Washington had something you might know this better than me, Michel. And was it if if people weren’t 3 minutes either 3 minutes early or 3 minutes after when they were supposed to arrive, he didn’t talk to them.

Edward Moss
He was very sort of keen on this punctuality thing as well.

Michelle Seger
He was keen on punctuality as well as a whole lot of other things. Yeah. Pretty brilliant, man.

Edward Moss
Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, I guess those are the way I would think about it. And very.

Michelle Seger
Interesting.

Edward Moss
I think about.

Michelle Seger
All right, so now I want to talk about incentive compensation and this is pretty interesting for me, really juicy topic because we consult with companies on incentive compensation plans. You work to automate the administration of them. So we both know a lot about plans and how they should work. First thing I just want to do is, is let us set a little bit Edward, about what an incentive compensation plan is and and really what it’s not because we surprisingly we’re going too many clients to design an incentive plan that we basically it’s really not designed as an incentive is designed to be.

Michelle Seger
And what that means is it really doesn’t do some of the core things that I’m going to ask you to tell us about. And and it really doesn’t it’s just not what it was intended. So let’s first talk about definition of what an incentive compensation plan is. And then I want to get into some of the the attributes of one.

Edward Moss
Okay. So I guess one is an incentive plan and so, you know, there is often a lot of muddying of the wording around incentives and bonuses. So I hope you correct me if this isn’t in the exact definitions you’re looking for. So I guess, again, when I think of incentives is it is paying is looking and it is paying for people based on the actions they’re doing, bonuses are typically retrospective on paying on something that has done typically a fixed amount and often sometimes is a surprise factor.

Edward Moss
So typically at the end of the year, have we made a profit and therefore here have a bonus is that the definition is you want to use special or how would you?

Michelle Seger
I think that’s a great definition. I want to think about, you know, like what your definition. So when I think about incentive plans and you said it, they’re they’re two they can drive an individual or even a team specific behavior. And what we talk about, too, is that when you look at how how do you drive behavior? Well, you’ve got to make sure that people are in control of the the elements of that plan.

Michelle Seger
So if you earn this, you know, this is what you have to do to to earn that. So, for example, if I’m being paid on, oh, let’s say gross margin of a product, but I have no control over price, that just doesn’t seem to drive much behavior and align with what you expect me to do. So, you know, when we hear about incentive compensation plans, a lot of times we’ll go and say, well, that that isn’t really an incentive plan.

Michelle Seger
And I guess the biggest component that I would say the differentiator is, is that it pays people based on their level of performance. So if I don’t perform well, I would expect that that person would incrementally earn less than someone that is at expected performance. To someone who is that high performance. So I wouldn’t expect that everyone’s kind of treated the same, but that there would be incremental differences.

Michelle Seger
And anyway, that’s kind of, you know what I don’t see a lot of times when we go in and look at plan designs and I guess also some of the things I’d like to dig a little deeper on, some best practices will also see something like, I don’t know, you want to you want to move to a particular product and service.

Michelle Seger
And what we see is we’ll end up looking at plans and there might be 50 ways that someone can get paid, 50 ways to get to your quota, right? So it’s just very interesting to me the how there seems to be a little bit of a misunderstanding as to what an incentive compensation plan is, and yet companies do want to utilize it to drive behavior.

Michelle Seger
And it’s very powerful. When used properly. So, you know, I’d like to get your perspective on what are some like incentive compensation plan, best practices and also just what’s what are some things that you’ve seen that maybe don’t drive the right behavior or mistakes that you may have seen out there?

Edward Moss
Yeah, I think there is this tension between the complexity of the plan and an alignment to ultimate profitability. So I think often what happens is you start with a fairly simple focused plan. Everyone understands and then over time more components and more rules are added to this to make sure that it completely aligns. And there’s no possible way that someone can earn an assignment that might not be in exactly the right direction for the business.

Edward Moss
But then every five years or so you will have someone say, This has got ridiculous, let’s redesign this. So we’ve got to focus again. And that’s the kind of cycle and that we might see and I think that is a common problem is a lack of focus. You got metric, you get six metrics and so the salesperson doesn’t know what to what to focus on.

Edward Moss
And I think that that’s one we see a lot. And I think if we talk about trends that we’re seeing a little bit now, I’d we’re not seeing any very many camps anymore on a and on a commission down level. And we’re starting to see thresholds introduced to create space panels so that the bottom performers and virtually no variable compensation.

Michelle Seger
That’s interesting, no caps, but yet and a threshold, we’re starting to see the same thing as well. Before we talk about, well, it could be a good time to talk about some incentive compensation plan, good design principles. So, you know, we can riff a little bit on this one. I’ll tell you, couple of mine, no more than three measures in a plan.

Michelle Seger
Now you give one.

Edward Moss
Oh, gosh. So, so for me, I’m trying to think of my and I think the other one would be aligning to business goals. And I think I think that’s the main one. And people seems to see that. It seems to get missed sometimes.

Michelle Seger
I’ll say alignment to what you the behaviors that you expect of that role or the outcomes of that person.

Edward Moss
Great. I think I’m going to lose this tennis match. And I guess the focus on it might be, well, some of the principles depend on your business, but one of them, for example, might be a focus on cross-selling and upselling, which I guess an example of the behavior looking to try.

Michelle Seger
OC simple and easy to understand and communicate. Boom, we won’t have to go any further.

Edward Moss
Absolutely. Thank you, Michelle.

Michelle Seger
Okay, so but this is something that you do know a lot about as well, which is commission versus quota based plans. And that rate based versus quota, we often get asked about that, too. And you know, it’s been interesting for me, Edward, we’ve had some companies that in the pandemic when are through the pandemic as the ability to forecast and the ability to set quota has been, you know, more with greater volatility than we had seen before.

Michelle Seger
We actually saw some companies just say we’re just going back to an old fashioned commission rate based plan. So whether I went back to one or I’m in one today, let’s talk a little bit about, you know, why people would have one plan, one type or the other. And then if you want to make a shift, typically they start with these commission plans as well.

Michelle Seger
What you and I would would say and then how they would kind of make a shift over to a quota based plan. But it really want to know the why behind that as well. But you know, kind of what types of businesses would use a commission or rate based versus quota when we think about best practices?

Edward Moss
Well, typically industries, if you’re looking to motivate sales and you’re really focused on growth and then commission is often the way to go, particularly for small businesses because essentially you want to you’re paying per sale and it’s a cost of sale based approach and the difficulty with them becomes if you sell a lot, then you end up earning a lot.

Edward Moss
And finance is not always very happy with that. And so it’s the quota based plans come in when you want to try and be able to predict the costs a little bit more. And so I think of course, plans is basically so sophisticated, the commission rate plans, because all you’re doing is saying a quota based plan is you’ve got a quota, you’ve got an on target commission.

Edward Moss
And from those you create a bait, usually a base commission. Right. And what you can see from that sort of it’s a three points is you’ve got to have all of those correct. And that allows you have a bit of extra flexibility to say, well, we’re going to pay a slightly less commission rate in this territory and we’ll adjust the quota.

Edward Moss
So and and we want to pay this individual more. So therefore we will increase that ATC and allows you to kind of move those variables around that an additional level of sophistication which can be useful for businesses. Obviously, the problem comes when prices are very volatile, as you said, with the COVID pandemic. It means that the commissions that people are being paid go go all over the place and you then it can be very difficult to motivate people correctly if you can’t set the right quotas.

Michelle Seger
So if I’m in a commission plan, right, and this commission plan, how do you get people if you want to shift over to a quota based plan to understand it, but then also believe that they still have the opportunity to earn as they did before? I mean, you know what we hear a lot any time the plan is changing, the big concern is are they this to reduce my potential to earn?

Edward Moss
Absolutely. And I think there’s a halfway house here, which is to introduce the idea of a self quota and where you have a because by introducing that quota and you introduced the quota and an on target commission and then there’s still earnings for every cent they make. And essentially you, you, you can see that they can then see that that’s effectively the same as the commission rate.

Edward Moss
So that is often a halfway house before you start doing anything more sophisticated and start playing with the graph that you have. So instead of just being a straight line going from 0 to 100% attainment and on target commission and all the way up from that, you know, typically it might have a threshold and then have some accelerators after that.

Edward Moss
So an intermediary is to have that and just have that straight line graph for a period of time before you make the full change.

Michelle Seger
I think that’s really interesting. So and good advice, I think for for sales leaders. So now I would like to talk about your another area of expertise for you, which is sales performance management technology. And you know, can you just you know, it started out years ago. In fact, it used to be called ICM back in the day, incentive compensation management systems.

Michelle Seger
Right. I remember those days and it wasn’t that long ago, I don’t think. But anyway, yeah, the you know, the whole thing was around automating payments, right? Being able to manage and administer the payments easier instead of compensation payments. But it’s kind of evolved and you know, the first question that we’re often ask is kind of like, what is it and how could it enable me?

Michelle Seger
And I know that what is it? Edward can be pretty broad depending, but can you just give us like a, you know, an overview of like what the technology looks like? And, you know, you can have different levels of technology and what that can look like for an organization.

Edward Moss
Absolutely. So and sales performance might be the history it is. It started with ICM. So incentive compensation management, making sure you are paying people correctly. Since then, it’s evolved in what I would add in a similar way to, I guess in a solution setting almost style from, well, okay, we’ve got the commissions, but you’ve only sell half my problem here.

Edward Moss
Now I other my other problem is, well how do I set the territory and how do I set the quotes. So you’ve got these sort of three likes. Think of it as a three legged stool, but you’ve got to have the territories, right? You’ve got to have the quotas, right? And you’ve got to have the amount of commission.

Edward Moss
Right. And if any of those legs are wrong, you’ve not got a good sales incentive system in place. So what these systems do is they help you make sure that you’ve got each of those legs right. And initially, yes, they started on the ICM and then, you know, we were starting to see some sort of shaky legs based in exile about how we’re going to do over territories and how we’re going to do all the quotas.

Edward Moss
And but that’s where they’ve expanded to over the last five years. So I would say now that sales performance management is not just the ICM, it’s also those different territory and quite a pace. And then on top of that, it’s also about not just paying people accurately, but actually motivating them by showing them the right information. So that’s where I’m SAS Performance management that’s out now.

Michelle Seger
So if I am a CRO and I’m thinking about making that shift, we now have full disclosure, OpenSymmetry as a partner of sales globe. You know, we have a lot of confidence in the work that you guys do. You come in and really do a great job. You don’t have skin in the game in a particular technology.

Michelle Seger
What you want is, is what we want, which is what’s the right solution for our clients. If I’m S.R.O., I’m like, okay, I got to do something here. What are just some of the fundamental questions that they should be asking themselves? I’m going to ask you later to kind of give us some resources people can go to. But, you know, if I’m thinking about how I can have more visibility perhaps, or I’m just exploring, you know, we need to automate this thing, we have way too many disputes.

Michelle Seger
What are some of the initial things that they should be thinking about as they start that journey?

Edward Moss
Absolutely. So I think it’s a really asking that question because they’ve got a good side to the problem, then that’s already a great start. So again, really understanding where you are at the moment is probably quite a tricky perspective. If you don’t have a system in place, but is a task well worth undergoing because from that you can understand and I’m going to do it again, I’m going to current state, future state, and then you can evaluate whether it makes sense.

Edward Moss
But that that those are the things to make to start asking yourself is actually where am I now? Do I have good data to back that up and then starting to look to towards the future state with? And what do I hope to achieve by implementing this solution? And that might could be, you know, I’ve been savings that could be sales motivations.

Edward Moss
And I think perhaps one of the reasons that some organizations do this is they look at the amount they’re spending on sales compensation services, the the message that that is sending here is this pot of gold that we’re giving over to you. And then they’re not really thinking about how they’re delivering that message. So it’s, you know, that they’re handing over these gold coins in a plastic bag rather than, you know, a nice pot of gold, I guess.

Edward Moss
But that that’s one of the ways I like to think about it.

Michelle Seger
That’s very interesting. So I want to ask you that. So you also go into a lot of companies that have implemented a system. I’ve actually called you guys in the past where a client has said to us, we want to take this out and put in a new one. Right? And many times it’s not a system problem. So let’s just talk about some of the biggest mistakes that you see.

Michelle Seger
And I think there’s probably just a handful when people have implemented a system that hasn’t been fully thought through and now they’re dealing with the outcome of something that may not align to what they thought the outcome was going to be.

Edward Moss
And so often it’s preparedness for the implementation. I think there’s two things that really seem to I mentioned to potentially three, there’s data quality issues and B, sometimes these systems actually are the first time that people realize how bad that data is and they realize they’ve been paying people for wrong for a long time. And that’s a bit of a sticky situation to be in resolving data quality issues or over an ICM system or an SPM system can show you look at the problems a lot quicker.

Edward Moss
It can resolve your underlying data issues. So that’s I say one big problem. I’d say the second one is around change management and future state definition, particularly if you’ve got where the data is wrong to start with and then it’s a very difficult conversation to have with, you know, some of these systems are used for salespeople, some of these are used for external organizations that they’re paying to say, Well, we’re now going to be paying you a different amount.

Edward Moss
And that’s because our data was slightly altered previously. So that change management piece can be massive as part of that change management pace, you also need to look at who’s going to be running the system off to go live and do they have the right governance structure in place and are they enabled to do it properly? So I would say maybe two or three points that I’ve seen.

Michelle Seger
I think those are really great things and we have seen this as well. Great things to point out. I guess I would and I would add one third, which is that we find that companies and, you know, it’s not I’m not denying any of the software providers, but it’s not really in their best interest to examine and help them understand the current plan designs and what we find is that companies are automating plans that are not optimal for their sales roles and the coverage model and the outcomes they expect.

Edward Moss
Now, you’re absolutely right. You can automate bad plans and then you have efficient bad plans, which you know, yeah, I guess it’s better than previously.

Michelle Seger
All right. So now I want to think about the possibilities that a AI offers to optimize sales performance management outcomes so we can target you know, we already know about from a it’s very interesting to me because you had brought up things like being able to help with dispute resolution, being able to assist with prioritization of your territories and, you know, and in your accounts, like what is some of the possibilities.

Michelle Seger
I think we’re just starting to see what the possibilities could be, but how you envision either current state, how A.I. is being leveraged for sales performance management outcomes to optimize them, and what might be on the horizon.

Edward Moss
Yeah, so I think we’re seeing it filter into tools now and I think the key ones are going to be around chat bots. I think they also a lot of key benefits. They are always available so you don’t have to have a team running shifts 24 hours a day. There’s always the chatbot there, although they’re a bit annoying at the moment and I think I’m pretty confident that they’re going to get better.

Edward Moss
You know, they’re not going to be the Microsoft Paperclip app. They are going to be a bit more like chat app, which you’ve also said in your mentation or your compensation statement too, and say, We’re looking at my compensation statement. Why am I being paid this, for example? And I think that’s going to resolve 90 or 90, 95% of queries are going to be handled like that.

Edward Moss
That’s that’s potentially a potential number there. And I think that’s going to ease off the workload on administration teams, which enables them to be honest. And I think that’s probably the short term, the quickest one we will see, I think longer term and there’s more of sort of predictive analytics piece coming in which we see for territory optimization already in some companies, perhaps not done is not always done within the sales performance management tool.

Edward Moss
But if you’re looking at really tough optimization problems, like what is the what are the right territories, given that here are all the locations of my individuals here, all my locations of a clients, and that minimizes the amount of driving that will be sales individuals are going to do, then that’s a really tough optimization problem and that’s the kind of thing that can I add, particularly predictive analytics element is going to be able to help with.

Michelle Seger
That’s really interesting to me. So if you don’t mind sharing, I think this would be kind of fun. Are you leveraging a I yourself personally in your work, in your life and how might you be? I always like to ask people this question now because it’s it’s got so many interesting possibilities.

Edward Moss
Absolutely. So I’m learning Dutch. I’ve been living in Rotterdam five years and my Dutch is okay, but not as good as it should be. And to get instant feedback on my Dutch writing and where I’ve gone wrong and why there’s nothing better than using AI. I think I am really good for writing tasks in general and anything where there’s an example of it being done on the internet and as a whole.

Edward Moss
And yeah, my, my mom uses it for writing parking complaint letters that there’s so many potential use cases. And I think that’s I think that’s why there’s been so much hype around. I it’s because everyone’s been able to use it and get some benefit out of it.

Michelle Seger
It’s really interesting. Okay. I did want to bring up one thing that I meant to bring up around predictive analytics. So traditionally, you know, pre AI, let’s call it predictive analytics all the deal, right? But but really hard to execute on so everyone talked about it talks about it but but you know operationalizing it and then the reality of what it would tell you can you can you talk to me a little bit about how you see AI being able to facilitate, you know, facilitate predictive analytics and what that looks like?

Edward Moss
Yeah, absolutely. So I do have predictive analytics is it takes some information and it predicts what’s going to happen in the future. And that that certainly is something we’ve seen happening throughout the world in the last four years. But or maybe more. But I would say that where it hasn’t taken off, where I expected was performance management and I thought, you know, the data is clean.

Edward Moss
You know, we’re paying people on this data. There’s really good questions to ask of the data. So does paying people more get them to perform more? What’s the optimal commission scheme? Is it all the questions that could be asked of your data? And but we haven’t seen, as you said, being used to try and understand what’s really going on there.

Edward Moss
And I think the reasons for that are and but it’s often done by different teams. So you have many organizations, big organizations who have data analysis teams who are actually just not looking at the the SPM system. And I think the other one is experimentation. I think it’s very difficult for companies to experiment with their salesforce and their incentive plans in the way it might be easier for some and shops to vary pricing at different locations and see the effect that that has varying what salespeople are going to be paid based on something is not something that many companies are happy with.

Edward Moss
And I think without that experimentation stage, it’s very difficult to prove conclusively and tweak the plans to get the right amount. So I think in summary, I think it’s often different teams are doing it and people are not willing to experiment with their sales team because they see it as so vital to their business.

Michelle Seger
Mm hmm. That’s again, some really good advice because we often do see that I.T. And sales performance management, sometimes they live in different places, right? You think they do not, but maybe sales ops owns the sales performance management and it does end up creating some disconnects, particularly when we’re talking about data integrity and and what’s needed and prioritization of that.

Michelle Seger
Yeah. So I want to ask you how people can get more information from you because, you know, you wrote a really amazing paper on AI and I loved reading it because it wasn’t just about sales performance management. Now I it even talked about, you know, some of the fundamentals. So what are large language models, lands and how do they work like people really are interested in That is very relevant topics as well as sales, performance management.

Michelle Seger
So how can people just learn a little bit more and get some great content from you?

Edward Moss
Edward I was a first of all, there’s plenty on our website, so on open synergy dot com and type in open community and you’ll find it. And second is if you type my name in LinkedIn, I’d be on LinkedIn and if there’s any specific questions, happy to get in touch.

Michelle Seger
Okay. Well, I want to thank you so much for being here with us today and I really appreciate it. It was super insightful and I do hope that you will come back.

Edward Moss
Absolutely. Thank you. Michelle. Enjoyed the conversation very much.