Sales and Employee Compensation Programs

Employee Compensation and Performance- One of the biggest management challenges for a growing business is compensating salespeople effectively. You know you need an incentive compensation plan that encourages your sales force to land new accounts and continue to upsell existing customers, but where do you begin figuring out the best way to compensate them? It often boils down to finding the right balance between base pay and commission and/or bonus.

Sales incentive programs can have an enormous impact on the bottom line and on future growth of the business. Executing a well-designed sales compensation plan can help companies create a sales culture of high performance where individual goals are aligned with those of the larger organization. Furthermore, building a reputation for recognizing and rewarding good performance while also helping companies attract and retain top sales talent.

Every compensation plan should be constructed to help your company achieve its strategic goals and to synchronize with the primary elements of the Strategy for Sales Perfection. If the plan does not achieve these two objectives, you need to restructure your compensation plan. Secondarily, your compensation plan needs to address the inherent goal to attract, reward and retain the right people.

A sales compensation plan is a way to put your sales and marketing strategy into operation. Given the impact that sales compensation plans can have on growth, almost every company with a sales force should take a more strategic approach to designing their incentives plan. Fully understanding both the key drivers of successful sales incentive programs and the ways to optimize them can be complex, and plan specifics can vary widely.

Here are some of the essential elements to include:

Strategy - The business' sales strategy, incorporate product sales initiatives into the plan, and finally, what the business is trying to achieve. Keep in mind that you will need to consider your environment, your product categories, your marketing plan, and your competitors.

Performance measures - Spell out benchmarks and performance measures to help guide the sales force in terms of their focus.

Payout formula - This is perhaps the most essential component that spells out to your staff what is in it for them. The payout formula lays out how they will be paid in terms of straight compensation or commission for sales.

Develop Meaningful Sales Goals and Performance Objectives - Successful selling means motivating sales people to attain certain objectives. Be realistic with these objectives and make sure that each level can be reached.

Never structure your compensation plans around a straight commission. It limits the number of candidates you will attract, and it typically drives sales volume towards lower margin items that are "low hanging fruit". Straight commission programs seldom drive sales volume within proprietary and high margin product categories. If you are a proponent of commission only plans, then design the plan around a base and commission.

Sales compensation formulas should be a mix between base salary and variable pay. How you decide to structure the plan rests entirely on the type of business you are engaged. Completely evaluate each and every aspect of your business and how this will affect the plan, such as the autonomy of the sales person to control the sale, the kind of selling you are engaged, and the sales cycle of your business. Let your top performing sales people provide input to the plan, include your HR department in the plan design, and devise a suitable formula with an implementation strategy.

I personally believe a sales compensation plan should be structured around performance to annual budgeted profit objectives or product penetration objectives. I find these to be highly effective and typically bestow all the objectives management is trying to achieve. Additionally, these plans should be indexed to meet certain performance goals designated by company executives. Consider the following example.

Assume you have one sales person for this model and the sales person is paid according to the following plan. This plan is based upon the assumption that the sales person will be compensated for attaining their quarterly profit goals.

Learn more about our company and topics covered in this article. http://www.winningsalesstrategy.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ted_J_Vinci

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الله اكبر

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دورة وورد بريس ( المدونات المجانية )

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إعلان فيديو مجانا خدمة في DFP الأعمال الصغيرة، متاحة لجميع الناشرين - داخل برنامج AdSense

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Top 3 Reasons Why Multichannel Customer Communication Is a Must-Do By Harvey Spectre

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The conventional call centers are confined to providing services only over the phone. They can either make the calls to customers or receive the calls from them. But this is NOT sufficient in today's times when the customers expect multi-channel communication. The customers want the business to be accessible through the e-mail, chat, social media etc.

As the typical call centers didn't have the facilities to engage with the customers on such platforms, therefore the contact centers emerged and became instantly popular.

The bouquet of offshore contact center services includes interaction through all the possible channels of communication. It is indeed become immensely important to utilize all avenues of communication today, simply because of the following three reasons:

1. Customers are omnipresent

Your targeted customers are literally everywhere, spread in all parts of the real as well as virtual world. If you are overlooking any communication opportunity, then you are losing out a big chunk of your possible profits. So if the business wants to reach out to the heterogeneous customer base, then they should be good with social media, where they can tap the youth, and also be good with e-mail through which they can connect to the professionals etc. Greater the number of communication touch points, more the number of customers whose lives we touch.

2. Customers are judging the way you communicate

Any business has to be prepared for a scrutiny by the customers if they want to become the trusted brand of the customers. The customers form an impression about the company's products and services by evaluating the quality of communication.

As all the call centers are also dependent on VoIP, and e-mail and chat are also powered by the internet, therefore a robust IT infrastructure is very important. The business must invest in its infrastructure and get the best IT services to ensure that communication never suffers from a downtime. Business should be able to always respond to the queries of customers in real-time through various multi-channel mediums.

3. Customers want convenience

The business should ensure that customer support should be accessible. If the customers get trapped in a labyrinth of IVR and have to face hostile agents, then the purpose of customer service is defeated. The business must avail IVR development services by a renowned vendor and get their IVR designed in a user-friendly way. All the agents must also be trained to assist the customers and aim for FCR (first call resolution).

We at Gold IT understood the importance of multi-channel communication with the customers early, and have been ahead of the curve. Our combined expertise in IT as well as communication has made us the trusted vendor for integrated customer support.

If your business is still stuck with the phone, then this is the time to make the transition with Gold IT. Because multi-channel is the future!

Harvey Spectre is a well appreciated IT expert who serves the industry with scholarly research on the IVR services that have become a compulsion in the Gold IT telecom industry. In addition, he also develops white papers on offshore call center services services, technical helpdesk support, outsource call center and oss billing solutions and services.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Harvey_Spectre

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Tips For Making Professional Cold Calls

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When you start in sales, cold calling in any format is a way to find new potential prospects to sell your product or service too. This may come in the format of marketing events, like setting up a booth at an industry trade show and meeting prospects and gathering business cards for a follow up call, setting up a webinar for a topic which your prospects may be interested in and in exchange they supply their contact information for a follow up call, supplying an industry rated "white paper" for prospects to download for a follow up call, tracking visitors to a website for a follow up call, pounding out calls on the phone to speak with the decision makers in your target market, or a long time ago, my company had a person who literally walked the streets physically walking into established businesses and asking if they were in the market and getting business cards for sales people to call and to follow up on!

Honestly I do not know if literally knocking on doors in the business world is an active practice anymore. I do know that cold calling is far from being "dead" and is still a very effective means of obtaining a scheduled meeting with a prospective decision maker or significant person of influence in order to speed up the sales cycle.The one consistent theme is that the sales people have to "call and follow up" on any of those methods. There is a reluctance to do it because lets face it, it is not always an easy job. If cold calling and setting meetings is your daily job you can have days of just total frustration. However, you can also have days where you stumble on to a number of fantastic leads that has a clear path to what could be an incredible sale!! When you find a few of those you suddenly become exhilarated and want to find and convert as many as you can.

Here are a few tips, tricks and techniques when making professional cold calls. Lets first talk about the 'gatekeepers'. Most likely that will be the first human you will actual speak with. Voice mail is a constant issue and there is another article I have written with tricks and techniques to help you overcome that. However, lets deal with how to approach people when you do get them live on the phone. Gatekeepers can very often be helpful to you when you approach them with respect. Although you feel you are the only person in the world, imagine that this person, lets say a VP of IT's administrative assistant, probably talks to 10-15 of you a day. First of all, they usually will answer the line and provide you their name. Immediately jot it down so you can call them by name when appropriate. If they immediately say "I can put you in his voicemail", one suggestion would be for you to confirm that he or she is the correct person to leave a voice message for and engage him or her in a conversation. For example: "Sure I am happy to leave a voice mail, but before I do I was wondering if you could possibly help me, just to confirm he is the correct person to leave a voice message for, Sue, Is Mike involved in making decisions regarding tools for your database management systems, would he be the best person to approach in order to schedule a quick follow up meeting?". If you are respectful and treat them as the valuable resource they are, many times you will get a friendly response. For example; "Oh, well sure Mike would be the end of the line decision maker here, but you know I think you'd do better talking to Matt on his team, he really does the evaluations of those types of things specifically and recommends solutions to Mike". "That's great thank you Sue, do you happen to have his extension?". Obviously from there it is important if you can to obtain Matt's title and last name and spelling is incredibly important for an email follow up. At that point you can do a little research on Matt at LinkedIn or Google and know how to approach Matt. When calling Matt you should always reference the string of where you got his information, for example: "Matt, Sue in Mike's Office gave me your information and I was told you would be the proper person at Xcompany to schedule time with for an introduction about how (your company) has helped (good current customer reference's within Matt's industry) to save as much as 80% on their database costs. Would you have some time next Tuesday in the morning to schedule an overview and technical demonstration call with me?".

Referencing the referrals on cold calling is invaluable. It is a powerful way to be professional and turn a cold call into a warm call and increasing your odds of success. If you are fortunate enough to get the exact person you are targeting to answer the phone, lets call her the SVP of that multi-million dollar company, even a seasoned cold calling professional can get a little nervous. Lets face it you now have ONE shot that will last you maybe 30 seconds to obtain a follow up meeting with THE decision maker. These next phone tips should really be the same if it is the SVP, Director, Manager or Administrative assistant. First, use a high quality phone. Test the phone and leave yourself a voice message on your cell or other phone so you can hear the quality on the other end. There are many headsets on the market, the very expensive ones are good but use your best judgement. If you have 30 seconds and the first two are your prospect being able to tell you are on a headset or poor quality phone you have already set a bad first impression so the rest of you 29 seconds had better be stellar.

Never follow a written script. If you are in enterprise software or high ticket item sales, it is very easy to tell if someone is 'reading to you' and they will dismiss you pretty quickly. You need to know the 'script' you have designed and repeat it until you are able to be conversational and light. Keep your speaking at a nice pace, not too fast and not too slow. The initial impulse is to get all that information out there quickly because you know your time is short but work on speaking slowly and distinctly. If you sit when you make cold calls, a good practice is to stand or walk immediately when you get someone on the phone. It allows you to think on your feet and creates a higher level of energy. Always jot down names, extension, anything that could be useful for follow up calls, because if you become methodical you will also become highly effective.

By practicing some of these tips, tricks and techniques you will become a highly effective cold calling professional. Over time you will find you may even have to make fewer calls with the same result because you have learned how to approach the calls and prospects effectively. The end result is always the same, which is more sales and an always overflowing pipeline of potential sales! Good luck and good selling!

http://b2bprospectingtools.com/

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Robbie_L_Dewe

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Four Proven Ways to Boost Online Sales Using Social Proof By Blaire G Jones People like approval, and in the context of online shopping, approval comes in lots of different flavors. For a familiar example, think of Amazon. One way Amazon encourages approval-seeking after purchases is with recommendations and social icons that encourage buyers to share what they bought on Facebook or Twitter. But there are some unfamiliar and very subtle kinds of "approval" that demonstrate social proof and trigger purchases in much simpler ways. Sometimes, merely seeing evidence of strangers' purchasing behavior is enough to boost sales significantly. For example, when the daily deal site Troop Swap added a "counter" to their website that was only visible to half of their visitors, they discovered something remarkable. The counter had a significant impact on sales. People who saw the counter, which had the basic appearance of an odometer and showed the number of times the deal had been bought, made twice as many purchases and bought 50% more per order than the people who had seen the website without it. Proven ways to boost online sales by displaying social proof The magic of the counter is in the triggering effect that seeing other people's purchasing behavior has on a prospective consumer's own spending. The designer of Troop Swap's experiment, data scientist and PhD economist Katya Vasilaky, spoke with us in October and explained that the purchases reflected in the counter make the deal more attractive. In other words, the purchasers influence one another to buy at a higher rate than they would have otherwise by giving the deal social proof. Besides counters, there are other ways websites visualize purchasing behavior. For example: Social feeds. Fab.com has incorporated a real-time feed onto their sales site that aggregates and displays purchases and general product excitement evidenced by likes, tweets, and shares of Fab.com merchandise on Facebook and Twitter. This display of social proof is clearly effective for Fab.com-CEO Jason Goldberg reported that 25% of Fab.com's Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales were traceable to social media. Customer reviews. When someone is at the crossroads of a purchasing decision, they like to know whether the choice they're considering is a good one. Because of this, online customer reviews have become incredibly important for consumers. In fact, 70% of Americans check online reviews before making a purchasing decision. The effect of positive reviews on business is staggering (i.e., for restaurants, an additional Yelp star can mean a 5% to 9% increase in revenue), so cultivating the reviews and displaying them in multiple places can have a big impact on sales by endorsing the offering. Customer Activity. Online retailer Modcloth has a Pinterest-style gallery that allows customers to display their purchases. It also has visuals from its "be the buyer" program, indicating the items that have been chosen by people in the ModCloth community (rather than professional buyers). The highly interactive visual approach is working-COO Kerry Cooper says there are a percentage of customers who visit the site 10+ times a day, and the be-the-buyer program had 17 million votes as of November 2012. The industries and the methods of displaying social proof vary, but the message is clear - people like to see evidence that they're doing the right thing when they're contemplating a purchase, whether it's totally passive, like with a counter, or extremely interactive, as with an on-site gallery. Ways to manage the cost of displaying social proof There are a few downsides to displaying purchasing behaviors and customer activities, but there are ways to manage those costs too. For example: Exposing sales information to competitors. By displaying the number of sales to prospective customers with a counter, a site is also displaying the number of sales to everyone else... including competitors who could copy or otherwise profit from the purchasing information. To manage the risk of contributing to competitive intelligence with their counters, Groupon deliberately lowered their counts to deflate the number of sales by up to 20% for any given deal. Other businesses should consider the benefits of the sales boost against the cost of the information falling into the wrong hands. Not every method works on all sales models. Counters work particularly well to enhance sales in the daily deal model, when the time period in which goods are available is condensed, and there are limited quantities. It probably wouldn't have the same effect for unique items, or luxury items where exclusivity is a part of the product value. A Pinterest-style gallery like the one ModCloth offers would probably only confuse purchasers of, say, medical supplies or construction materials. To evaluate whether a gallery-like approach would work on your website, think about your main customer base and what kinds of social media they use most when deciding what kind of social proof will work best to boost purchasing. Some times, what's displayed sends a negative signal, or doesn't do anything. It won't do any good to show negative evidence about your offering. Curating and displaying poor restaurant reviews is obviously a bad idea. In the context of counters, some research indicates that the positive effects follow an inflection point after a certain number of purchases have been made so there could be a negative signal when a counter shows only a few purchases (or none at all). To manage this risk, a site using a counter could have the appearance of the counter triggered only after a threshold number of purchases have been made. The bottom line is that showing prospective customers evidence that their purchase would be a good, quality decision is very powerful. Whether it's with counters, reviews, feeds of social activity, or evidence of an engaged customer base, displaying positive social proof gives potential customers the information they need to make the purchase. Spinnakr's active analytics displays custom messages on your website in real time, so referral traffic visitors see the right information as soon as they land on your site. Sign up for a free trial at http://spinnakr.com. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Blaire_G_Jones

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