Strategic Discipline Blog

Determining how to compensate your sales team or person is often one of the biggest challenges a business can face.  Finding capable sales people is a challenge onto itself and then determining who the keepers are makes this muddier.  If you want to keep the performers, you have to come up with a formula that pays them for performance and yet doesn’t hook the company too long compensating them just for potential.  One of our strategic partners, Dave Kurlan of Objective Management Group wrote a blog Sales Force Compensation - X Marks the Spot that offers great insights in the process of rewarding your sales staff.

Kurlan and his team at OMG are experts in sales evaluations, understanding who is capable of performing and who isn’t. They’ve worked with over 8500 companies and 500,000 sales people analyzing sales performance.  One of the keys to developing fair sales compensation is recognizing the length of your sales cycle.   The sales cycle is the time it takes for your business to convert a prospect.  If your business is outbound in most cases your sales cycle will be longer.  If leads come to you chances are your cycle is shorter.  Determining whether a sales person is capable or not requires an evaluation of their ability to convert prospects based on the length of your sales cycle.

Is your sales process important in your business?  Is it one of the critical business systems we described in the Fourth Discipline?  If it is there’s also a strong possibility that finding sales people may be another critical system that you need to have functioning at a high level in your business.  Strategic Discipline requires you to recognize the vital cogs in your business and ensure they perform to a very high standard. 

Positioning Systems in partnership with Objective Management Group can help you evaluate your present sales people, and help you select successful sales candidates at a rate of 96% or better.  We also provide sales training and sales system development.  If the sales team and sales process is an important part of your business consider subscribing to Dave Kurlan’s Understanding the Sales Force blog.  Ask us about helping evaluate your sales team, helping you find sales performers and training and developing a sales system that provides a generous return on the investment you make in your business.