Compensating the Sales Force: A Practical Guide to Designing Winning Sales Compensation Plans

How sales people are paid has an immense impact on their performance. The right sales compensation program can lift a company's sales into the stratosphere and send its bottom line soaring; a poorly constructed plan can be disastrous. How do you find out whether your company's plan is working as well as it should? How can you construct and maintain a program that's tailored to your company's needs and sure to succeed? In "Compensating the Sales Force," sales compensation guru David Cichelli helps you answer these questions and many more. While sales compensation is a powerful tool, choosing and structuring the right plan can be confusing. This authoritative, jargon-free handbook guides you through the entire process, from setting target pay, selecting the right performance measures, and establishing quotas to determining the mix and upside opportunities, and constructing the right formula.In clear, concise language, this unique guide explains the basic concepts of sales compensation design, which apply to every industry; reveals why job content, not industry, is the source of compensation design; and provides a hierarchy of sales compensation formula types. You'll learn how to construct and calculate formulas for payout purposes and establish support programs such as quota allocation, sales crediting, and account assignment. Cichelli provides a 10-step process for redesigning the sales compensation plans at your company.He presents guidelines for administering and automating your program, rolling out a new plan and explaining it to your sales force, and auditing and assessing your sales compensation program. Complete with dozens of real-world examples that illustrate important points and demonstrate specific techniques and procedures, "Compensating the Sales Force" provides all of the cutting-edge tools you need to design, construct, and implement an effective sales compensation plan that maximizes profits and keeps them climbing.David J. Cichelli has 20 years of experience designing sales compensation packages for companies large and small, including Verizon, Charles Schwab, FedEx, and Hewlett Packard. Design a sales compensation plan that sends profits soaring Sales compensation works! It's the most effective tool managers have for motivating the sales force, improving their performance, and increasing profits. Creating a winning compensation plan, however, requires careful analysis, accurate calculation, and a clear understanding of sales compensation fundamentals."Compensating the Sales Force" provides expert guidance in the strategic, tactical, and technical aspects of sales compensation plan design. It supplies clear guidelines for selecting the right compensation plan for any type of firm, of any size, in any industry, and it offers step-by-step procedures for implementing each approach. This unique, jargon-free handbook gives managers the expertise they need to: Set target pay; Select the right performance measures; Establish quotas; Determine the mix and upside opportunity; Construct and calculate the most effective formula, and Implement support, administration, communication and assessment programs.