When you have a well oiled-sales team, it can be difficult to determine who deserves the most reward when a deal is completed. If everyone is performing their function to the letter, who should receive the most compensation? Should it be spread evenly across different roles? To make matters worse, different markets and businesses conduct sales differently and have unique jobs and goals. This all muddles the decision, do you reward the initial rep, the manager who oversaw the process, or the sales tech who made the deal possible?
Obviously, all these roles deserve some amount of compensation, but where you give the most compensation reveals where you see the most influence in your sales team. Is your team a group of equals, or does it contain standout workers who make the whole process possible? The goal here is obviously to reward effort, as no matter what the goal is always to hit sales targets. Balance is key, if you reward managers too heavily, sales reps will feel snubbed. Focusing entirely on the sales team may not properly motivate your managers. The more complex your business will only add to these levels of strain. Any given business may contain groups who make initial calls, service agents, writing agents, salesmen, and executives. Which is more valuable, the member who started the deal or the one who closed it? You want to give the biggest piece of the pie to your members with the most influence, but defining those workers is never easy.
The greatest solution to this conundrum is to maintain flexibility over your compensation plans. You must be able to identify any number of aspects that are affecting your team’s performance. Identifying standout actors, as well as reviewing your sales process, and finding the points of greatest impact. Moreover, this cannot exist in a state where your compensation plans are up in the air, you must have exact knowledge of who is getting what, and why. Performance tracking and compensation knowledge are all possible with the aid of an ICM solution, and these are only a small portion of the benefits one may bring. At the end of the day, there is no better way to manage your team than by knowing them inside and out and having a critical understanding of why your business works.