Good commission plans incentivize sales teams to take action. Typically, that action translates to a closed sale but sales teams do more than just sell. In fact, according to UpLead, salespeople spend only about a third of their day actually selling. They have to perform other tasks, from writing emails, making calls, and entering data, to get to the selling.
Incentivize your sales team to keep running through the steps that lead to a sale with commissions.
Obviously, a closed sale is the ultimate goal. However, motivating salespeople to successfully complete the tedium that comes before selling helps facilitate that sale. One effective way to provide that motivation is to expand a commission plan to address a wide range of sales team activity. At Core Commissions we can help you incorporate this data into your commission cycles. Here’s how to get started.
How to Incentivize Behavior
If you’re exploring the possibility of including additional sales activity, consider what your team does in a day. This likely includes a number of tasks that lead up to a sale. Your team may be making multiple phone calls to connect with a single prospect or using social media to sell to a new audience. Any of these behaviors can be tracked and rewarded.
As an example, a commission plan could reward a salesperson an additional $25 for every five new phone calls. Additionally, a rep might earn $50 for every lead driven through their social media efforts.
What Behavior to Incentivize
Here are a few examples of activities that could be incentivized through a sales commission plan.
- Calls: Per research from TOPO, it can take 18 phone calls to reach a single prospect. That means a sales representative needs to be really driven to keep making calls. By incentivizing the number of calls a salesperson makes, a commission plan can provide that persuasion.
- Emails: TOPO also found that only about 24 percent of emails are opened by prospects. So salespeople really need to finetune their email skills in order to even get eyes on their pitch. Rewarding reps for increasing their open rates could encourage them to write better emails.
- Social Media Leads: Using social media to sell products and services has been shown to increase closed sales. Compensating salespeople for hitting a certain social media posting quota each week will result in more posts. Add an incentive for earning leads through those posts and you’ll get more effective posts.
- Data Entry: Cultivating a relationship with a prospect is key to securing a sale. In order to do that, salespeople need to record information about what those prospects want. They should be keeping track of the number of conversations as well as the content of those conversations. Commissions based on how much info a rep collects on a prospect encourages them to keep up with data entry.
- Referrals: Leads are 30 percent more likely to convert if they originate from a referral. That’s why sales reps should be asking customers to refer prospects from their networks. Trigger this behavior by offering an incentive for every referral they draw from one of their customers.
- Customer Reviews: Account managers and other sales team members handling customer relationships need incentives too. A good method is to reward individuals every time they earn a positive review from their customers.
How to Track Sales Team Behavior
Once you’ve decided to incorporate behavior into your commission plan, you must determine how to track it. This may require a few process changes. Teams may need to start logging calls in a CRM and report social posts they’ve published. A sales analyst may need to start tracking website traffic referred from social media websites as well. Data entered into a CRM should be attributable to the rep. Referrals and reviews can also be tracked in a CRM system.
Whatever it is, there’s a way to track it. It’s best to work with your commission manager or sales operations team to come up with the best solution. And make sure that you clearly communicate the new processes and commission changes to your team.
However you decide to track behavior, you’ll only need to load it into Core Commissions to apply it. Our application can be integrated with any upstream or downstream data source, making that process even more simple. Contact us for more information or set up a free demo with our team and we’ll show you how we can help.