How Much Does that Sale Cost (and Who Is Getting Paid for It)?
While there are several common analytics that mature companies use to evaluate their sales compensation plans, Sibson Consulting’s Dennis Spahr delves into two that recently have garnered extra notice: compensation cost of sales (CCOS) and number of credits per sale (or ratio of credited to actual revenue).
» Read the WorldatWork Sales Compensation Focus article

Put Your Energy Where It Matters
While it may be true that what gets measured gets done, not everything that’s measured is equally valuable—and over-measuring can bog you down.
» Read the Miller Heiman Sales Performance Spotlight article

Are You Ready for Selling in the ‘Cloud’?
For companies entering the cloud services market, bringing the sales force along can be daunting.  Sibson’s Sales Force Effectiveness Practice Leader Joseph DiMisa tackles the subject with a multi-part series; first up for discussion: structuring the sales force.
» Read the Perspectives article

Rapid Sales Comp: Setting Limits on Change
Highlights from the SalesGlobe/Sales Leadership Forum panel discussion on last minute sales compensation design.
» Read the SLF post

Sales Compensation: How to Overpay Your Top Performers
Companies paying commissions too early often exhaust their variable sales compensation budgets, leaving little for top performers. If you lose your best reps because they can make more money elsewhere, you can kiss next year’s goal goodbye, says Sales Benchmark Index’s Ryan Tognazzini.
» Read the SBI post

From Sales Ops to Special Ops: The Future of Sales Operations
Sales forces can no longer perform like a regular army in today’s demanding economic environment. Instead, to deliver on the heightened expectations they face sales teams must perform more like elite Special Forces. To get there, they need world-class sales operations teams to train, equip, and support them.
» Read the SandHill.com post

Sales Ops’ Catch-22: More Influence, Less Ownership
During the depths of the recession, conventional wisdom might assume that the best survival strategy for sales operations was to close ranks, specializing in core areas like process, tools, and data analysis. At first glance, the survey evidence seems to confirm this: nearly 1 in 5 organizations reported shedding key areas of responsibility like training, compensation, and forecasting. A closer look, though, shows that the leading organizations chose a very different strategy—one that instead extended sales ops’ reach.
» Read the Sales Executive Council post

Commissions: The Beginning of the End?
Commissions are an established way for insurers to compensate producers and to build business. But threats to commissions are gaining momentum in a number of mature life insurance markets. Towers Watson’s Jeremy Forty and Keith Walter take a closer look.
» Read the Emphasis magazine article

Incentive Compensation Practices: A Report on the Horizontal Review of Practices at Large Banking Organizations
The Federal Reserve reports on progress made to date by large banking organizations in implementing the interagency guidance on incentive compensation (issued by the Federal Reserve in 2009 and adopted by all of the federal banking agencies in June 2010) and highlights areas for future improvement and next steps.
» Download the Federal Reserve report

Sales Performance Management: Integrated System or Collection of Disjointed Practices?
Sales leaders share a common problem: assuring the CEO that revenue growth, sales profitability, and other non-financial objectives (e.g., market share gain, customer loyalty) will be consistently met through sales force performance. Sales management consultants and thought leaders Jerry Colletti and Mary Fiss provide a way for them to think about and effectively execute SPM.
» Download the Colletti-Fiss white paper (requires separate registration)

If a Territory Manager is a “Hunting Farmer,” How Should Their Comp Work?
New business sales jobs focus primarily on acquiring new accounts. In contrast, account managers often are assigned a book of business that includes several new business sellers’ territories; their focus is on retaining and growing established accounts. But what about the territory manager who is a hybrid of the two with the expectation to not only acquire new customers but also retain these customers (and grow revenue or profit margin)? The Cygnal Group’s Donya Rose suggests some compensation approaches.
» Read the Cygnal post

Structuring Sales Operations
The Sales Leadership Forum recently conducted an in-depth discussion with a group of experienced sales operations executives to explore the right structure for sales operations. This report contains a transcript of that webcast along with survey results from recent SalesGlobe research.
» Download the Sales Leadership Forum report

The Sales Operations Manager: A New (and Important) Umbrella Position
While sales operations managers call themselves by many names and cover many functions, there’s one thing on which everyone agrees: the position is moving from a tactical focus to a strategic one.
» Read the Selling Power article

How do we reward salespeople for strategic sales activities?
Strategic Sales Objectives, which are communicated in sentences, not numbers, are hard to do well. They take significant organizational discipline and require thoughtful review to ensure they are being used appropriately. Donya Rose of The Cygnal Group makes some recommendations to get the best results.
» Read the full response

Which Motivates Better, Cash or Non-Cash?
Mike Ryan of MADISON Performance Group isn’t sure anyone has the appetite for another debate—political or otherwise. But that’s exactly what he’s calling for: a renewed discussion about the role and potential impact of non-cash compensation.
» Read the Performance Perspect!ves article

Checklist for Assessing the Eeffectiveness of Your Plans
It’s planning time for many businesses—time to think through your sales compensation plan designs and decide if and how you’ll change them for the coming year. To prepare for this effort, it’s a good idea to check with your sales and business leaders about how they think the plans are doing. Donya Rose of The Cygnal Group shares a checklist to help get those conversations started.
» Read the Cygna

The Cost Side of ROI: Managing Sales Compensation Expense
While sales compensation is a powerful asset for growing the top line or redirecting an organization toward more profitable markets, it’s also an expense. Scott Sands of Aon Hewitt Consulting offers ten methods— from strategic to tactical and obvious to innovative — that can help manage it.
» Read the  WorldatWork Sales Compensation Focus article 

Selling Your Sales Compensation Plan to Management
If you want a smoother path to a successful new plan year, enlist the support of leadership early and often throughout the design project, say Beth Carroll and Donya Rose of The Cygnal Group.
» Download the Workspan article  

Common Problems in Pricing Sales Jobs and How to Overcome Them
Sales compensation experts Jerry Colletti and Mary Fiss tackle the three questions that commonly come up when pricing sales jobs: how to validate sales job content; which surveys to select and use; and how to weight survey values and adjust survey data to reflect differences in job matches.
» Read the Validate Sales Job Content “Short”
» Read the Surveys & Adjustments “Short”

The People and Politics of Sales Compensation
The SalesGlobe’s Mark Donnolo takes a closer look at the softer side of sales compensation plan design: who’s behind the scenes collaborating (or not); the steps in the process; how well the process works; how people work together; commonalities between the various functions involved; and solutions for challenges.
» Read The Sales Leadership Forum post (Part 1)
» Read The Sales Leadership Forum post (Part 2)

Incentive Program Governance
New Sigma's Scott Sands discusses the standards, roles, and other elements of effective program governance.
» View the Sales Incentives Practices Series presentation
» Read the SYNYGY Magazine article

Disguised Base Salary: When Incentive Pay Becomes Guaranteed Pay
Sibson Consulting's Dennis Spahr and Elizabeth Stolarczuk discuss the challenge a straight commission plan poses: incentive pay masquerading as base salary, aka "phantom" salary.
» Read the Sales Compensation Focus post

Align Sales Compensation to Your Strategic Accounts
Sales Benchmark Index's Ryan Tognazzini says a sales compensation strategy that focuses on aligning your internal resources can help ensure your company's strategic accounts remain its most valuable assets.
» Read the SBI post

Re-examining ROI for Sales Incentives
As more companies consider adding subjective achievements to program earning opportunities the return on investment calculation has become more nuanced. Madison Performance Group’s Mike Ryan re-examines some of the important considerations of ROI planning and offers insights on how sales incentive managers can make the connection between a representative’s behavior today and potential downstream financial benefits.
» Read the Performance Perspect!ve article

Commission vs. Quota
Sibson Consulting’s Joseph DiMisa lays out the respective advantages and disadvantages for paying on commission versus paying for quota achievement. Depending on the structure of the sale and the sales organization, switching from one approach to the other can breathe new life into a sales organization.
» Read the Sibson article

Compensation Cost of Sales (CCOS), Part 1
Better Sales Comp’s Ted Briggs launches a three-part series on this often misunderstood sales compensation metric. Up first: What is CCOS? Why should a company look internal rather than external?.
» Read the BSC post

Four Signs of a Well-Functioning Sales Incentive Plan
As a manager or administrator of the sales compensation program, what should you care about?  What measures characterize a well-functioning sales incentive plan?  NewSigma’s Scott Barton says you’re in an excellent position to assess how well the plan is working.
» Read the Sales Comp Insights post

We Like the Old Plan
The choice of whether to use a commission or a quota-bonus mechanic is one of the cornerstone decisions in any sales comp plan design. Sales effectiveness consultant Elliott Scott reviews which rules of thumb to use to help evaluate the options, if not come to consensus, when considering a change.
» Read the SalesComp Insights post

2011 Study Reveals Top 12 Selling and Sales Management Best Practices
The eighth annual Miller Heiman Sales Best Practices Study, “Sales Strategies for Thriving in a Post-Recession Economy,” reveals 12 sales initiatives that most significantly contributed to superior performance among world-class sales organizations. The performance metrics that improved most significantly included qualified lead volume, new customer acquisition and retention, salesperson productivity, quota achievement, and forecast accuracy.
» Read the press release
» Download the Executive Summary

Six Factors to Determine If Your Sales Results Are Good Enough
To understand whether your organization is doing well, you must consider a variety of factors that together tell a complete story. Blogger Marci Reynolds outlines six to consider.
» Read theSales Operations Blog post

Perspectives on Cross-Sell Incentive Plans
If the salesperson is focused more on closing opportunities quickly than ensuring long-term profitability, the deal economics may be jeopardized. Sales Executive Council analyst Beg Mashhood examines a new sales operations function that is gaining traction: Deal Desks.
» Read The Sales Challenger post

The Seven Deadly Sins of Measurement
Jim Champy, coauthor of Reengineering the Corporation, introduces a lesson on the pitfalls of measurement from Faster, Cheaper, Better: The 9 Levers for Transforming How Work Gets Done by Michael Hammer and Lisa W. Hershman.
» Read the strategy+business article
» Read the SYNYGY Magazine interview with the late Mr. Hammer

When Money Doesn't Speak Louder than Words
In this Harvard Business Review post, Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson of the Corporate Executive Board® suggest that when it comes to using compensation to boost performance, sales executives should focus less on the payouts and more on increasing how much the sales force believes that the process used to determine them was fair.
» Read the HBR post

Should You Put a Cap On It?
In commission-style sales incentive plan designs, whether to include a maximum reward, or cap, draws a different answer depending on if you’re in finance or sales. To sales management, capping goes against common sense: holding back the sales force is holding back business success. For finance, capping avoids what they consider excessive earnings for large, unexpected orders that have fallen into a salesperson’s lap. Chuck Csizmar, CCP of CMC Compensation Group sees merit in the finance argument and lays out some concerns that need to be addressed in sales incentive design and operating processes.
» Read the post

Assessing Stark Choices and Getting It Right
Companies that want to rethink their sales force structure need to address two critical questions: How many sales forces do we need? And to what extent should our sales forces be embedded in individual business units, rather than integrated as part of a centralized sales function? Given the inherent risk in a sales force redesign, the time and expense involved, and the likelihood of having to overcome some internal resistance, answering these questions correctly is complex and critically important. This in-depth piece from Booz & Co. outlines a highly-structured way of rethinking sales force design.
» Read the article

The Do's and Don'ts of Quota and Comp Plan Adjustments
There are a variety of reasons why companies need to make mid-quarter adjustments to quotas or compensation plans. But contrary to common belief, quota and comp plan adjustments don't always have to be jarring. Josh Setzer of the Sales Leadership Roundtable blogs on how to navigate the process with minimal disruption.
» Read more

2011, The Year to Shine for Best-in-Class Sales Operations Teams
What are the top priorities for sales executives in 2011? For IDC’s Michael Gerard, the first is to upgrade the sales operations function.
» Read the post

Keys to Success: Six Areas to Address in Your Next Sales Compensation
It's fall again, the economy appears to have shifted toward the positive in many sectors, and companies are thinking about redesigning their sales compensation plans for 2011. According to Beth Carroll of The Cygnal Group, there are six key areas that businesses must address In order to ensure the redesign process and resulting plans will provide a good return.
» Read the WorldatWork Sales Compensation Focus article

2010 Global Talent Management and Rewards
A vast majority of companies worldwide are having difficulty attracting the critical-skill and talented employees needed to help them rebound and prosper in the wake of the economic crisis. A new survey conducted by Towers Watson and WorldatWork shows however that the severity of this difficulty varies greatly from country to country.
» Read the highlights
» Download the report

SaaS Sales Compensation Made Easy
Are the metrics for calculating software-as-a-service (SaaS) sales compensation different? Chaotic Flow blogger Joel York takes a closer look.
» Read the full text

Clinching the Sales Quota: It's All in the Prep
Traditional selling has rapidly evolved into a sophisticated, data-rich environment requiring a myriad of contemporary prospecting, nurturing, and closing skills. Survey results from Aberdeen Research show that "best-in-class" companies were 52% more likely than "laggards" to deploy externally provided training on behalf of their sales teams.
» Read the full text

Slippery Slope of Sales
A huge amount of money is wasted each year on failed sales-training initiatives. Dave Stein of ES Research explains some of the reasons and offers some suggestions for improving the situation.
» Read the full text

The Current State of Performance Management and Career Development
A Hewitt Associates survey of 193 companies provides an overview of practices and their prevalence in performance management, as well as comparative data to use when considering whether to modify a current approach.
» Read the summary results
» Discuss the findings

GlaxoSmithKline to Implement New Compensation Program for U.S. Sales Professionals
» Read the news
» Discuss the implications

Time for Variable Pay to Deliver the Best Returns
Hay Group surveyed over 1,300 companies from across 80 countries on their variable pay practices and their plans for variable pay strategy in the future.
» Read the research

Engage with Pay
A Mercer survey shows the emphasis is back on pay programs as organizations focus on employee engagement to attract and retain top talent.
» Read the results summary
» Discuss the findings

Health Care Law Likely to Impact Sales Commissions
Buried deep in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) healthcare overhaul bill signed into law in March are provisions governing the health insurance industry that could greatly impact how insurers pay their sales employees.
Read the full article

When the Bubble Burst
Pharma is at a pivotal point in developing its sales and marketing strategy. Can it learn from past mistakes?
Read the full article

Moving from Commissions to Goal-Based Incentives
The commission-to-goal transition can be one of the most difficult program changes to implement.
Read the full article

Sales Compensation 101 for the Logistics Industry-Part 1
You need to be very careful how you design your incentive plan or you just might end up dealing with some unexpected consequences. In this two part article, Beth Carroll of The Cygnal Group lays out the basics necessary for developing well-thought out incentive plans for logistics companies. 
Read the full article

Sales Compensation 101 for the Logistics Industry—Part 2
Read the full article

New Commercial Model: Science or Swag?
Should pharmaceutical companies blow up their sales force or stick with the status quo? Experts from Deloitte Consulting debate.
Read the full article

Sales Pay Mix Varies by Position
When designing a sales compensation plan it is important to consider differences between types of sales positions and the impact they have on influencing and closing sales. Results from the2009 Culpepper Sales Compensation Design Survey on sales pay practices of technology and life sciences companies highlight variations in sales pay mix and issues to consider when deciding how much compensation to tie to cash incentives.   
Read the full article

Retailers Try On New Sales Tactics
In a bid to boost sales as consumers cautiously reopen their wallets, some retailers are putting more emphasis on top-line growth in employees' incentive pay and training programs.   
Read the full article

Fed Said to Press Largest Banks to Reduce Incentives for Risk
Federal Reserve supervisors are telling about two dozen of the largest U.S. banks they must do more to end pay practices that encourage excessive risk-taking and are ordering boards to step up scrutiny of incentives.   
Read the full article

Changing Channels: Insurance Company Sales Models
Should insurance companies embrace new, direct-to-consumer sales channels, or stick with the traditional producer-focused model?    
Read the full article

New Commission Programs for a Changing Sales World
Just a few years ago, many publishers had trouble getting their sales staff to sell digital in addition to print. After all, commissions on print were so much higher, why should a rep take time away from their cash cow to do more work for a lower return? Today, of course, most salespeople are eager to embrace digital, if for no other reason than to bolster their dwindling print commission. But how do you structure a commission rate in the age of multi-media sales.   
Read the full article

CSO Insights 2010 Sales Management Optimization Survey
CSO Insights 2010 Sales Management Optimization survey assesses how companies can increase the effectiveness of the professionals who manage their sales teams. Take the survey by April 4th and receive the full study analysis when it is released in June 2010.  
Read the full article

Pharmaceutical Sales Compensation: Past, Present, and Future
Since 2005, Towers Perrin (now Towers Watson) and Synygy have collaborated on the Survey of Strategic Sales Incentives Plan Design and Governance in the Pharmaceutical Industry. It has become one of the primary means by which companies in the industry measure their plans against those of their competitors, as they grapple with how to make their plans more effective, efficient, and aligned with changing business priorities.   
Read the latest survey results

Pharma Sales Comp Practices Are Due for an Overhaul
As a new decade unfolds, pharmaceutical manufacturers must straddle two worlds: one that features the legacy commercial model directed to prescribers, and another that embraces a new model focused on payers and other key stakeholders. As companies experiment with ways to engage a broader set of decision makers, they're envisioning new roles and organizational structures. According to a Hay Group Sales Force Effectiveness study, 2010-11 will be a period of experimentation, revision, and change in sales performance management as we have never seen before.  
Read the full article

WorldatWork Introduces Certification in Sales Compensation
To meet the growing need of HR professionals to increase their relevance to the sales function, WorldatWork has introduced a new certification to achieve the designation of Certified Sales Compensation Professional™ (CSCP).   
Read the full press release

Incentive Comp in the Banking Industry: Insights from Economic Theory
What can ‘mechanism design’ theory tell us about developing an optimal incentive compensation system for banks and other financial institutions, and would such a system conflict with the goals of society as a whole?  
Read the full article

Geographic Pay Differential Practices
Geographic location is one of the primary factors used in benchmarking pay rates and developing salary ranges for most jobs. The following article provides summary results and analysis from a 2009 Culpepper Geographic Pay Differential Practices Survey. It includes best practices and policies for how companies use geographic pay differentials to design salary programs and manage differences in pay between different locations.
Read the full article

Sales Quotas in Uncertain Times
The economic crisis is making it hard for sales teams and businesses to meet their sales goals. This is bad for companies, but it’s even worse for their sales people, many of whom rely heavily on incentive-based compensation. Should companies take a hard line and only pay sales people what their incentive contracts explicitly require.
Read the full article

New Sales Compensation Plan Checklist:
Ensuring Plan Success in the New Year hare
It's hard to believe that despite knowing the sales compensation plan is a primary driver of sales behavior (and, therefore, sales organization success), its launch is too often haphazard and ill-planned. Improve your sales comp plan rollout by following the advice of Mark Davis, managing principal of Valitus Group, for your sales compensation plan checklist.
Read the full article

Navigating the Cross-Selling Landscape: How to Capture
More Customer Share
Increasing customer share with key accounts is one of today’s top missions for many sales executives. Unfortunately, many start the journey to find the secret to successful cross-selling by exploring their sales compensation plans. Believing that insufficient motivation prevents their sales forces from expanding customer share, they often juice up their compensation programs, hoping that will provide the right incentive. But boosting sales compensation typically doesn't help an organization reach its cross-selling goals. Towers Watson's Craig Ulrich and Kathy Ledford explain why. 
Read the full article