The Compensation Question

One of the attendees from a recent workshop I was conducting asked how she could change the compensation for her highly paid, salaried producers, in order to provide the incentive to sell more.
If that’s all it takes, getting salespeople to sell more would be easy!  One of the many areas we analyze when we evaluate sales organizations is to what degree the salespeople are motivated to earn more money.  In a sales force like hers, we would likely find that the salespeople are not very motivated to earn more money and would likely rebel if the compensation were changed to pay less in salary and more in commissions.

There are two important points to understand:
1. If a higher risk – higher reward plan would excite them, they wouldn’t be working for this company in the first place.
2. There is an enormous difference between wanting more money (“pay me more”) and being motivated to go out and earn more (what must I do to earn another $50,000 this year?”)

It all goes back to hiring the right people in the first place.  Salespeople who are looking for security will never be your top producers.

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Eliminate Unpaid Consulting
Prospects want your information and expertise. Prospects have been trained by the vast majority of sales people to feel entitled to your valuable information. Most sales people are comfortable in coughing up their expertise for free. However, when the orders don’t come and the prospect has shopped your information to your competitor, the sales person has fallen victim to unpaid consulting. Before giving information, ask good questions: What does the prospect want? What is the urgency? What are the consequences of not buying anything? What is the decision making process? These are questions that, “Eliminate Unpaid Consulting”.

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