Sales Incentives: The How Behind the What Behind The Way

 You don’t need hi-research to make the connection between an intuitive incentive program and a Sales Culture that consistently creates rockstars while delivering incremental impact (yes, even in times of crisis). But if you want, it’s there. The bigger question is, what goes into the recipe of this culture? Let’s find out…

Ouch! Sales Has Changed  

Sales today is no longer the ‘wham-bam-yes-I-can’ shtick it once used to be. Sure, it is still one of the most rewarding and glamorous career pursuits out there - one where we hew our own success path by dint of raw talent, dedication, and hard work. In 2021, however, space is also highly sophisticated (some prefer using the monolithic term ‘complex,’ but that misses the glorious subtleties that have made the game less predictable and more exciting), involves de-riddling several new jigsaw pieces, and doesn’t always involve a linear A-to-B type path it once used to.

Powers Shaping the New Sales Incentive Plan

Today, customers are more aware and informed, making convincing them akin to building a well structured, step-by-step dissertation or thesis that must validate every claim with cogent reasoning and real-time data. The landscape of products and services is, in itself, more complex today - and demands a certain depth of understanding and familiarity from the individual evangelizing and promoting it. Buyers in the new era need ratification from the highest authorities, which brings influencers (who are subject matter experts, no less) into the picture in an unequivocal way. And finally, purchase cycles are way longer, making forecasts and goal-planning a far dicier proposition than before.  

Agile organizations have been alert to these disruptions for a while now and have been adapting (and backyard-breeding) templates and roadmaps to deal with this. Some common responses have been (A) embracing a multi-stakeholder sales cycle (team-based approach), (B) integrating digital and online channels, and (C) creating room in the loop for influencers and experts.

Decoding Change by Recoding Incentives

“Smart revisions of compensation models have been found to have a 50 percent higher impact on sales than changes in advertising investments.” McKinsey

Decoding the fast transforming scenario of Sales is imperative for businesses to survive and succeed (especially in crisis times as the current one). One of the ways to do that is to relook the incentive game. This is the bit that is often overlooked, though not by the smarter players. Creating whole new intuitive incentive models (i.e., blending salary, commissions, quotas, and bonuses in creative ways) that elicit the best out of team members, innovating behavior models that drive success on a ‘new playground’ and keeping team optimally motivated can be the X factor that drives growth in a context of uncertainty and ambiguity and helps leaders stay on top of change. And by trying different permutations and combinations of the many different variables (A/B testing mode, to borrow a term from digital marketing) that go into the making of a smart compensation and incentive plan, businesses can both decode the nature of the new reality better AND respond appropriately to consolidate competitive edge. 

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