Designing Sales Compensation Plans for Profitable Revenue Growth

Is it Time to Re-Think Your Sales Compensation Plans?

Revenue, commercial and sales leaders need to be confident that the organization is maximizing its return on sales compensation investments. After all, sales compensation is often one of the most significant cost areas for any company.

So how do you know if your plans are driving the proper behaviors, rewarding for performance and supporting your growth objectives? When should you consider a sales compensation plan design refresh or overhaul?

Clients come to the Alexander Group for sales compensation design help for many reasons that include their desire to:

• Transform the sales organization: Clients are redesigning their go-to-market model and have new roles, products or channels. New sales compensation plan designs require alignment with the new strategy and coverage model.
• Accelerate revenue growth: Clients may want to accelerate growth by focusing on new logo acquisition or better monetizing existing customers. Sales compensation plan changes ensure sales resources focus on the right customers and the highest priority products and solutions.
• Align with a merger or acquisition: Clients experiencing a recent merger or acquisition will require new future-state sales compensation plans that support the goals of the combined entity.
• Smooth out plan inconsistency: Over time, clients may find that sales compensation plans have been developed without consistent guidelines or a framework, leading to an excessive number of plans or multiple plans for the same role. This situation can lead to difficulty in executing company-wide strategies and controlling costs.
• Keep up with job evolution: Clients may be evolving the focus and priorities of their jobs and need to realign their plans to motivate the right behaviors.
• Address high turnover: Clients that are experiencing higher-than-expected turnover want to reevaluate the competitiveness of their sales compensation program against industry peers.

If you are experiencing any of these challenges or considering bringing in outside experts to review your sales compensation plans, Alexander Group can help. We offer a proven and collaborative three-phase design process to drive stakeholder engagement and buy-in throughout the design process.

1. Discover: Alexander Group works with you to align your growth strategy, go-to-market model and pay philosophy as the foundation for all design decisions. We conduct a comprehensive assessment of your current sales compensation program, providing insights on how well it aligns with the strategy, market practices and best-in-class principles. The result summarizes your compensation design strengths and opportunities.
2. Design: We lead the design team through a process to develop the new sales compensation plan designs, leveraging our frameworks, benchmarks and decision tools. The plan designs will align with strategy, drive desired behaviors and be fiscally responsible.
3. Implement: We work with you to ensure a successful rollout, including implementation planning, communication strategy development, and change management adoption resources. This approach ensures you successfully introduce your new plans to the teams and drive adoption.

Whether you are undergoing a significant transformation or want to refresh your sales compensation plans for the upcoming fiscal year, Alexander Group brings the expertise of working with thousands of clients from across the globe to achieve their revenue growth goals and objectives.