Sales Compensation Design

Australia and New Zealand Sales Consultants

For companies in Australia and New Zealand, keeping up with fast-evolving changes in how the modern buyer approaches purchase can be challenging. We help clients navigate sales challenges in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Whanganui, Gisborne, Tauranga and other major cities in New Zealand. For Australia, sales consulting and sales training courses are provided across the country, including in Sydney, Canberra, Adelaide, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Hobart and other cities.

The Challenges of Sales Compensation Design

While the most important objective of sales management is revenue attainment, achieving that final number comes from dozens of strategic decisions that define the sales organisation.

From sales territory assignment to the sales tech stack, companies must adopt several effective sales management strategies to propel the seller forward in closing a deal.

When it comes to motivating sellers, perhaps the single most important motivator is (no surprise) how the seller gets paid.

Whether your organisation seeks to create its first sales compensation programme or improve upon an existing sales compensation plan, Miller Heiman Groups's experts in sales compensation design provide consulting services and programmes that deliver a sales compensation model that motivates sellers, allowing organisations in Austalia and New Zealand to see improved business results from their sales teams.

Companies looking to improve upon their sales compensation design often struggle to answer many of the same questions and manage the following difficulties:

• Is there an inconsistent reward strategy for the sales team?
• Does the plan align to budget?
• Do sales force incentives reward top sales performers?
• Does the sales comp plan drive business initiatives?
• Is the sales compensation plan attainable across all roles?
• Are "windfalls" driving sales plan attainment?
• Is there higher turnover among high performers?
• Are the sales strategy and sales performance expectations misaligned?
• Does the organisation have inaccurate sales performance data?

The Path to Overcoming Sales Compensation Challenges

These struggles are not unique but must be addressed to achieve effective sales management that supports the underlying business goals for the organisation. This starts with sales departmental calibration and tightly aligning the objectives of sales management:

• Coordinate Targets: Though it seems simple, we often find one of the most important first steps of a well-executed sales compensation model is to ensure sales targets align with the goals of the earning plan.
• Consistent Conversations: Create a unified and consistent message with upper and middle management in the sales organisation to get them "talking the talk and walking the walk" when it comes to sales compensation plans; motivate them to take advantage of the incentives offered to bolster winning behaviours.
• Equitable Treatment: Effective sales management means a level playing field that includes fair and balanced incentive programmes, supporting that appropriate rewards for everyone.
• Keep Great Talent: Keeping the best sellers at your company is a key objective for sales management. That type of talent retention comes from a well-articulated, smartly implemented and fair sales compensation plan.

Three Winning Strategies for Effective Sales Compensation Design

In our experience working with thousands of large, global and successful companies, we've discovered that these three approaches often lead to the most effective sales compensation design:

1. Create Transparency in Sales Compensation Design
2. Streamline Sales Compensation Design
3. Optimise Current Sales Compensation Design

Creating Transparency in Sales Compensation Design

• Challenge: Sales compensation plans are often too complex for the sales force to understand, resulting in excessive "shadow accounting" and payout disputes.
• Action: One of the objectives for sales management in this process is to distil down key metrics and align to business imperatives with clear "If-Then" calculations.
• Impact: By removing multiple hurdles and qualifiers, the plan becomes more readily accepted and trusted by the sales organisation, reducing payout disputes while simplifying the understanding of payout calculations. Sales leaders can actually manage to plan, and salespeople are clearly motivated by the easy-to-understand incentive track.

Streamlining Sales Compensation Design

• Challenge: The company has too many role-based compensation structures, leading to an excessive total number of sales compensation plans. This individualization results in complexities, delays and potential errors in administration.
• Action: Develop clear role definitions with a streamlined blueprint for sales compensation design for each grouping. The larger the sales organisation, the more complex the roles within your sales compensation design. Typically, for an organisation with fewer than 300 sellers, we establish 2-3 role definitions; for larger organisations, we may design a compensation plan featuring 5 or more roles. The goal is to make the plan less complex, which makes it easier for sellers to understand and for companies to administer.
• Impact: Sellers benefit from clear guidance on how they earn their compensation, and sales compensation plans become easier to administer, resulting in improved on-time performance of payouts and accuracy of disbursements.

Optimising Current Sales Compensation Design

• Challenge: Your company invested in effective sales management by creating and implementing a sales compensation plan that coordinates targets, clearly communicates the goals to sales people, achieves equity across the organisation and structures your organisation so it maintains the right talent. So why aren't things working? If the sales compensation plan fails to drive the desired sales behaviours, it is time to evaluate it for weaknesses and make sure it aligns to corporate objectives. Updating sales compensation plans run a high risk--people leave when you get it wrong.
• Action: Assess compensation plans to ensure they align effectively with overall corporate strategy. Most organisations struggle with talent and messaging--as they fix these issues, it's critical to make sure that compensation aligns to these goals and drive the right behaviours. Companies also need to use the right data to feed good sales compensation design by measuring what truly drives an impact on corporate goals as part of evaluation criteria.
• Impact: Organisations improve alignment to corporate or marketing objectives by driving behaviour to incentive achievements, ultimately resulting in overall performance improvements

The Right Answer to Implementing Successful Sales Compensation Design

Once an organisation decides it wants to move forward with a new or updated sales compensation design, they must follow a three-step process to support successful adoption and utilisation:

Step 1: Assessment

We begin by collecting documentation around all sales strategy, sales process, compensation plans and verticals to establish the current objectives of sales management. By understanding your current practises, we can begin to shape recommendations fora go-forward strategy. Next , we conduct interviews with key stakeholders (leadership, sales, customers) while simultaneously reviewing past performance data to further understand the current efficacy of your sales compensation design. This often involves conducting a remuneration benchmark, a pay and performance analysis and assessing legal requirements for the organisation.

Step 2: Validation

Once the data point collection concludes, we validate all information against market trends and practises to identify opportunities for change and to agree on the new objectives of sales management that will drive your sales compensation design. Through this validation process, many organisations revise their sales compensation plan to include changes such as: aligning to new roles and buyer journeys; leveraging leading and lagging KPIs that measure performance; and emphasising that top performers in the new environment will be recognised.

Step 3: Implementation

The implementation strategy for a new or revised sales compensation plan anchors on a rollout strategy that includes a clear communication plan. Key tenets of that communication address "What's in it for me?" for the individual salesperson To sustain the change to the sales compensation plan over time, organisations will monitor key metrics, regularly solicit feedback and modify or adjust as needed.

Complimentary Sales Compensation Plan Discussion

If you'd like to speak with our sales consultants about your sales compensation structure and any sales compensation challenges you'd like to resolve, we'd welcome the opportunity. Please contact us to learn more about our sales compensation consulting services.