Top Compensation Challenges — What’s Yours?

Every year, SalesGlobe conducts a survey to find the top sales compensation challenges. And as varied as businesses are, as unique as some industries are, so often sales compensation problems unite them all. Below are a few of the top challenges that plague sales organizations large and small.

1. Setting effective quotas. Almost every year the top sales compensation challenge is actually setting effective quotas. And arguably, quotas aren’t even part of the compensation plan. Quotas are typically set after the compensation plan is designed. But quotas are the linchpin between the compensation plan and performance. You could have a very effective compensation plan, but ineffective quotas can derail the compensation plan. Quota setting, obviously, is critical.

2. Differentiating top performers. Too often in companies, it’s easy to make a good living with a mediocre performance and very difficult to make a great living, even if you knock your quota out of the park. How we do we take the top people and differentiate them significantly from the mid range or the lower performers? We call the solution the Reverse Robin Hood Principle: take the performance pay from the lower performers and provide that to the higher performers with the objective of being able to recruit and retain the best talent.

3. Supporting the sales strategy and sales roles. One of the first steps in designing a sales compensation plan is to make sure we understand the direction of the business. How do you connect the corner office to the front line? The vision of that C-level whether it’s the CEO, CSO or COO, has to flow through in the compensation plan. It’s amazing the number of times we see a disconnect between the priorities of the business and what’s actually being paid for.

4. Driving solution selling. How do we make sure that we’re enabling solution selling through the sales compensation plan and that solution selling is also being supported through other elements of the growth management system? Solution selling itself cannot be driven by paying people multipliers for different sets of products. Product mix is actually a surrogate for solutions. Effective solution selling starts with the strategy and understanding directionally where we’re going. Enable people to sell solutions and have the right offer. Then compensation can come into play and make sure we can motivate people in the right direction.

5. Keeping the organization engaged. This was a bigger issue in the past couple of years than it is at the moment. But over the last couple of years it’s been a big question: how do we keep the organization involved when they’re not hitting their quotas and they’re not in the money on their sales compensation? If we have people floating down around 80%-85% of quota, how do we keep them from riding out the storm and waiting for the year to pass? Are there other types of reward and recognition, or are there adjustments we can make to the plan?

6. Plan complexity. Plan complexity tends to be an underlying issue and an underlying challenge in most organizations. We see this in particularly complex organizations or organizations that are oriented around multiple products or services. When we try to represent too many things in the sales comp plan we create complexity. Then two things happen. First, the message of what the sales comp plan is telling the organization to do starts to break down. And second, we increase the complexity and the difficulty of administering the plan.

Of these six challenges, what is the biggest problem for your organization? Or is there another challenge not on this list?

To learn more, visit SalesGlobe or email mark.donnolo@salesglobe.com.