Commissions and incentives drive staff performance. That goes for more than just the sales team too. It could be an effective way to motivate other non-sales employees to hit targets and goals.
The right way to distribute commissions to non-sales staff and whether that will work for your organization depends on your overall goals. For instance, if you need customer service to improve satisfaction or marketing to drive leads, those efforts can be incentivized.
Lift up all employees, including non-sales employees, with commissions and incentives.
Who Can Benefit from Commissions?
A wide range of employees could view commissions as an opportunity to earn more money. In fact, some businesses have chosen to pay all of their employees commission based on company revenues. Other structures may incorporate bonuses or perhaps profit sharing – more on that below.
The bottom line is that really any type of employee can be paid commission so long as that acts as a motivating factor for them. In order to determine who at your company can benefit most, it’s important to understand how every team operates. Having that intel will help your organization determine what makes the most sense in terms of awarding commissions company-wide.
How to Incentivize Non-Sales Employees
As with any commission plan, there are a number of ways to structure incentives and commissions. Here are just a few of the ways that organizations may determine commissions for non-sales employees:
- Incentivize Activities: Look at what each department does on a day-to-day basis and provide incentives for reaching certain goals. This means rewarding staff for completing tasks or a certain number of tasks during a preset timeframe. For instance, warehouse managers could earn an incentive for completing inventory within a certain period of time.
- Reward Results: Rather than compensating employees for simply completing tasks, organizations might consider honoring results. That means that customer service representatives could earn based on customer success and reviews instead of on how many calls they make. Marketers could gain commissions based on how many leads they’ve generated.
- Base Pay on Revenue: Delivering payments company-wide based on a percentage of revenue could act as a far more universal solution. In this case, the commissions or bonuses would be based on business revenue as well as the employee’s performance but it might be a more simple calculation overall.
- Set Up Bonus Structures: Offering yearly bonuses to employees is a common method for incentivizing performance. This is often based on how well the employee performed and it’s rewarded upon a yearly review.
- Create Profit-Sharing Programs: With this method, the organization pays out a portion of profits as opposed to revenue. Generally, the earnings under this type of plan would be based on a company’s profits either during a quarter or over the course of an entire year.
Should You Do It?
Providing incentives for you non-sales teams could be effective method to keep all of your employees motivated. However, it has to work for your organization’s overall goals and for your employees as well.
Essentially this comes down to knowing your employees. Does your culture cultivate the type of attitude that responds to incentives? Additionally, will a commission plan translate to a competitive salary for every employee in your industry? A company-wide commission plan also needs to serve an organization’s goals. So if revenue or sales are a primary goal, this compensation method could work for everyone.
If you determine that you’d like to expand or initiate a commission plan, we can help you automate the entire process. Contact us or get a free demo with us and we’ll show you how it’s done.