Incentive compensation blog

Commercial performance: 6 ways for improvement to optimize your business performance with incentive compensation

Written by Hervé de Riberolles | July 10, 2019

Better target your prospects and speed up the time needed to process your leads to ensure their conversion. Your priority: business performance. Our imperative: to meet your needs through our specific method.

 

FOCUSING ON HOT LEADS

A reminder: a lead is a business opportunity, a person potentially interested in your products or services. Located upstream of the conversion tunnel, leads can eventually turn into contacts and then customers, but a large part will never generate business.

 

QUALIFYING LEADS TO GENERATE VALUE

Lead qualification will help your teams focus on real value drivers. Objective: put their energy on the best prospects and not waste their time on the curious and always dissatisfied.

Lead qualification helps your sales people become more efficient and better control your costs. It's a chance to boost the motivation of your salespeople! In this way, they will start their sales process with really interested prospects.

So that your salespeople can rely on the valuable information needed to qualify their actions, it is necessary to encourage them to fill the database of the company. Generally, they dislike a lot this administrative part... The control must then be done as often as possible.

The data ensures the qualification of the leads (who subscribed to the newsletter, what are the requests for contact via the website, who asked a question on the forum, what are the contacts established through social networks, etc.) and thus increase the hot leads. In this regard, Close more deals is a tool of choice to help you identify the "heat" of your prospects: hot, cold or changing their minds.

 

 

ADOPT THE STRATEGY OF THE ACCOUNT BASED MARKETING

In this context, it seems essential that the management ensures the setting of the objectives of variable remuneration according to the strategy of the Account Based Marketing. It's about helping them to smartly prospect and focus on strategic accounts. Objectives: make them adopt one-to-one marketing strategies, provide them with the necessary tools to adapt their product offerings to their customers and subsequently build their loyalty.

How to proceed? Select the targeted accounts, identify your contacts, perform a benchmark and a strategic roadmap. Marketing and sales departments should work closely together to achieve their goals. Because the success of one depends on the other. Why not give them an incentive bonus, in addition to a team bonus, for achieving their individual results? It is a question of focusing on sales versus target objective.

 

WORKING THE CONCEPT OF TIME TO VALUE

The time to value: a strong indicator in your sales process. It makes it possible to judge its efficiency to generate qualified leads and the performance of your teams to answer them with relevance by answering their needs as well as possible. It will help you in the production of the turn over as quickly as possible.

 

LEAD SCORING SUPPORTING YOUR TEAMS

Thanks to the tools of marketing automation, the "lead scoring" allows you to manage the leads according to their maturity. Sales forces have a portfolio of prospects to work according to their needs. From the prospects willing to buy to contacts in prospecting situation, even without any specific need; scoring improves fluency within the conversion process. The argument and the accompaniment will be completely different. In addition, there is no need to adopt the same business strategy: the time spent negotiating and the communication with an optimized target will be totally different. You will lose less time in expensive, untimely recovery steps.

 

THE 3R: THE RIGHT INFORMATION, AT THE RIGHT TIME TO MAKE THE RIGHT PROPOSAL

How to define 3R? The right information, at the right moment to make the right proposal.

One solution: make a premium on closing time to encourage your salespeople to finalize their action and avoid the famous fridge effect. Nevertheless, this mode of remuneration can be complicated in some sectors of activity.

A good solution is to adapt your variable pay to time to value, in particular by ensuring that your teams have the necessary levers to produce the expected performance. Think of this to stimulate the calculating mindset of your teams by giving them access to a simulator of their incentive compensation so that they can project on their future bonus according to the performances they anticipate.