Throughout my long consulting career, I’ve never ceased to be amazed when I hear a company chief executive or head of Sales exclaim “I don’t understand why those sales people act the way they do.  We tell them to do one thing and they do the opposite. They just don’t get it.  Do I have to fire them all?!”, or something to this affect.

The real issue more than likely has less to do with the sales team than with the senior leadership.  Entrepreneurs and senior executives are usually so consumed with wearing multiple hats and the complexities of keeping the ship afloat, that they often temporarily forget the basic blocking and tackling of sales force optimization.  Nothing can be more damaging than a sales team not performing.  

The reason that there often is a disconnect between what the sales team is doing and how they are perceived to be performing is that the expectations of the leadership is not aligned with the metrics driving the behavior of the sales team.  The issue jumps off the page if you stand back and take a strategic view of the overall motivations and make-up of a sales person and the way your company is motivating them.  Let’s examine this for a moment.

The behavior of Sales people overall is not difficult to comprehend.  In a way, sales people are fairly simple creatures.  They are going to act EXACTLY in concert with how they are compensated.  Sales people are motivated to a large extent by monetary gain.  There are a myriad of other factors that can motivate a sales team (more on this in another article), but by and large, you can depend on the promise of a big payout to get their attention.   No one can tear apart a compensation plan to find the fastest route to money quicker than a sales person.  This does not make them somehow dark or negative. 

The sales profession is a high risk/ high reward scenario.  The people who are willing to undertake these inherent risks to their compensation are a special bunch apart from the norm that can be more valuable than diamonds.  The key is to understand what motivates them such that you can build a compensation schema that creates a reward structure that will drive them to act how you want – sell more, sell what you want, to who you want, etc.  Therefore, it is imperative to align the sales compensation plan metrics and rewards with the desired behavior.  Sales people will perform in line exactly with how the behavior their compensation plan is structured to drive. 

Therefore, when your sales team is not performing/ acting in line with your desires and expectations, don’t cast outright blame on them.  More than likely there exists a disconnect between the desires of the company leadership and the very behaviors that the sales compensation plan is driving.  Make a change to the compensation plan metrics and watch how fast the sales team starts performing more in line with your expectations.

What kind of changes can/should be made to the compensation plan to drive the desired results?  We’ll dive into this and more in our next posting on Sales Force Optimization.

By Mark Francischetti
VP Marketing & Business Development

http://www.CxoToGo.com
937-272-6868 cell
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it