Compensation plans are essential in incentivizing sales reps to reach sales targets efficiently. As such, they should be regularly reviewed and improved if necessary.
This means changing, or at the minimum tweaking, plans at least annually for most companies. Usually, sales compensation stakeholders — sales operations, sales leadership, finance, and HR — review the plans during the last three to four months of the year and make changes that better align with the upcoming year’s objectives. During this review, you’ll consider the performance and operations of the plans. Are the quotas reasonable? Are the accelerators rewarding your top performers or all of them? Do you have good, clean data needed to make payout calculations promptly? Are parts of your plans confusing or distracting your reps?
It’s common during the sales year to tweak minor plan attributes. Less frequent is when a company considers modifying its compensation plans because a significant change needs to happen in the middle of the year.
In this guide, we’ll discuss four common drivers of sales compensation modifications and then explore the six best practices that will make your next transformation a breeze.
