Hiring an administrator or a team to handle sales commissions is hard enough. Once that’s done, an organization also spends resources training new hires on how to manage commissions, bonuses, and other incentive programs.
In order to get that commission manager or team up to speed, a number of hours must be invested into coaching and instruction. A variety of tasks need to be assigned along with standards of practice guidelines.
Training a commission management team requires hours of coaching, training, and direction.
Since we’ve worked with highly trained and skilled commission administrators for years, we understand what goes into the process. Our Managed Services commission management team has seen it all. Perhaps we can help you map out the training curriculum for your next commission hire.
What Does Your Commission Team Need to Know?
- Commission Rates: The first obvious thing someone running commissions needs to know is what rates each payee earns per sale. Those rates may vary depending on the type of sale. The person managing your commissions needs all of those details at their fingertips.
- Sales Quotas: Especially if they’ll be dealing with accelerators or decelerators, your commission manager or managers will have to understand how sales quotas are assigned to your sales team.
- Variables: Any additional variables that impact commission payouts also should be cataloged for the individual or team of individuals handling commissions. This could include elements such as hierarchy or territory that may determine how commissions are distributed.
- Data Sources: Where does the data used to determine commissions originate from and what format is it in? These are questions you’ll answer for a new commission manager — those answers should be comprehensive.
- Products & Services Sold: It’s wise to lay out the specific aspects of every product and service sold by the organization and how that applies to compensation. Often commissions fluctuate depending on what type of sale occurred as well as the price of that sale.
- Existing Processes: How has the organization historically maintained commissions? This information will be helpful to those tasked with continuing that maintenance.
- Commission Cycle Schedules: In order to keep commissions on schedule, ensure that your new hire or team has a solid understanding of when commissions are paid out.
- Report Templates: How should a commissions report look for this particular organization? It’s important to stay consistent with the documents distributed to payees to cut down on confusion and disputes.
- Any Other Commission Practices Unique to the Organization: Every company has particular commission methods. Determine what those are and ensure that your new team has a clear awareness of those and how they work.
How To Train Your Commission Team:
The ways to properly train a commission manager, administrator, or team vary as much as the organizations that hire them. However, we’ve found a couple of effective ways to ensure that all of the intelligence detailed above gets communicated thoroughly.
- In-Person or Face-to-Face Orientation: Once a team has been onboarded, it’s time to get in front of them with the tasks they’ll be performing. It’s best to do this with some visuals so either in-person meetings or video conferences will be best. We recommend setting a few days aside for these meetings to ensure that all the material can be covered. Account for enough time so that the new hires can ask as many questions as they need.
- Standards of Practice Documents: If detailed how-to records and other lists of standards of practice do not already exist, it’s time to get them on paper. Work with the people who know what needs to get done to ensure that these documents cover the tasks of every process involved. Keep these documents in an accessible location. They may be saved on a shared drive or flash drive that the employees can get their hands on easily.
- Regular Check-Ins: In the first three to six months, meet with the commission managers or administrators regularly. How often depends on commission cycles but once per week may be wise at least in the initial months. As the team starts to dig into the job, they may have more questions and need additional clarification. If you make yourself available to them, they’ll feel confident they can navigate their way through their new responsibilities.
Training a commission team can be overwhelming and eat up a lot of hours and resources. Rather than spending all your valuable time on this, why not work with our commission team? Our Managed Services program would allow you to refocus any time you’d spend on hiring, training, and managing people to handle your commission plan. We can take all of this off your plate and automatically hand you a team of people who’ve seen it all and know how to get it done.
Contact us for more information or request a free demo so we can give you the details directly. We look forward to helping you streamline commission management.