3 key principles to speak about incentive compensation with your sales people

Be confident, your sales people will perform well. One variable to make sure: motivate them well. To push them to invest in the business project, be transparent when you discuss with them the issue of incentive compensation.

TRANSPARENCY: GOOD PRACTICES OF COMMUNICATION

To motivate your employees, an essential rule is to adopt transparency. In addition, employees who have all the information relating to the calculation of their incentive compensation from the beginning, participate more willingly in the collective effort. There are three ways to improve the transparency of the compensation process, including:

• preparing good communication at the beginning of the cycle
• organizing follow-up meetings and drawing on good examples
• communicating fairly and equitably at the end of the performance cycle

Also, it is essential to communicate well at the beginning of the cycle, especially when setting objectives at the beginning of the year. Ask yourself, rightly, these strategic questions in order to be able to answer them in front of your collaborators:

• What are the objectives of the company, the department?
• What are the collective and strategic objectives?
• This is the appropriate time to announce your compensation plan in broad outline: what are the performance periods?
• What are the indicators of performance measurement and according to which schemes?
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The explanation in objectives setting

Individual goals, on the other hand, are set in face to face. Through which criteria? According to the history, the potential of each, the dynamism of the sector on which the person evolves. The environment is to be taken into account. But to be motivating, an objective must be understood, integrated and endorsed by the collaborator. This is why it is often necessary at the beginning of the cycle to discuss this objective and to explain it.

MONTHLY FOLLOW-UP MEETINGS

Good practice: You can organize monthly meetings to monitor the calculation of variable pay. They specify the criteria to be taken into account in the calculation of the latter. These include the company's margin, turnover, the number of new customers, the number of leads. Employees, knowing and being able to check these numbers themselves, and especially how much they can earn with a simulator, will naturally be quicker to play the game and more involved to achieve their goals. This tool provides the right calculation at the end of the performance cycle. It highlights the real performance of the employee

STIMULATING THE CALCULATOR SPIRIT OF BENEFICIARIES BY SIMULATION

Your sales people will be more motivated if they can project on their future earnings. It is difficult to tell them where they are in the middle of the performance cycle across all the individually-awarded indicators. It is also not easy to create progressivity in the bonuses and to evaluate the performance of each one in the light of this progressivity.

There is a tool that allows continuous monitoring of their performance. This digital tool helps them calculate their own incentive compensation without any miscalculation and transparency.

Your employees will then be able to simulate their future bonuses according to the performance they anticipate for the following periods. The bonus gauge systems telling the employee where he is and the amount he can earn are linked to the bonus feature created in the tool.