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Sales is hard work. You probably won’t find a career as specific when it comes to people and their salary. Sales departments are usually the loudest and liveliest in a company. The people in them are hungry for and motivated by money.
Therefore, pay a lot of attention to your sales commission scheme. You need to set it up the way it’s reasonable for your business and achievable and motivational for your sales representatives at the same time.
If you’re struggling with setting up sales commission schemes, keep reading. We’ll instruct you on the earnings amount level, fix to commission ratio, calculation, pay-out frequency, and some general do’s and don’ts to ensure your team stays motivated to achieve their goals.
BEFORE you start drafting a sales commission scheme. First of all, we want you to understand that every leader struggles with commissions first. It can take up to years till you find the ideal type of commission scheme for your company.
There are several steps in setting up a sales commission scheme. To make the set-up more tangible, we’ll provide some examples along the way.
The first step is to establish the company sales target and decide what channels they’re going to come from - new sales, retention, upsell and cross-sell.
Decide what kind of sales roles you need in your sales department. Set the individual duties and sales targets. Don’t be shy to create a table - there will be more.
Responsibility | |
---|---|
Sales Development Representative (SDR) | qualified leads or opportunities/month |
Area Executive (AE) | new revenue USD/year |
Customer Success Manager (CSM) | churn rate |
Meaning how much can salespeople in these individual positions earn. Keep adding to your table. Here you have to consider your market specifics, such as industry, location, and the sales person’s seniority. We can’t give any financial indications in this step.
Responsibility | Goal | OTE (UDS) | |
---|---|---|---|
SDR | qualified leads or opportunities /month | 20 | 40k |
AE | new revenue USD/year | 1.000.000 | 150k |
CSM | churn rate | < 5% | 100k |
You should always set a variable amount (commission). The more the sales representatives work, the more they can earn. This is an obvious plus of being (and staying) in sales. However, don’t substitute sales representatives’ salary for the variable in 100%. Even though people in sales are quite often hunters and risk-loving people, they still need to pay their bills.
Two major indicators can help you set the ratio:
Bear in mind that in SaaS, the commission should be between 4 - 6 times more than the sales representative’s salary. That’s a healthy amount for them to deliver and for you to pay.
The frequency of paying-out the commission correlates with the sales cycle. Let’s take the complex SW solutions VS phone plans example again: It might take year/s to sell a solution to a bank, and there are not that many customers for this segment. In this case, the commission pay-out frequency can be once a year. While selling phone plans, the sales cycle will take up to 2 weeks, and the customer base is broad. Therefore, you can give commissions every month. Deals with sales cycles somewhere between these two scenarios can have a quarterly payout (Quite the standard in B2B software sales).
Don’t cap the commissions! And if you already have, uncap it. It’s been proven that uncapping can increase the performance of the whole company by 8%. Having a cap can genuinely harm your revenue, as it’s very demotivating for people who have already achieved their sales target. What should motivate them to achieve more if there’s no reward? Moreover, in the upcoming year, you’d probably raise their target by a lot if they reached more now, so their lives would be just more difficult for nothing.
Now, let’s look at the table below, showing the three most common commission schemes in B2B sales. Explanation below the table.
Target example | Reward method | Fulfillment 590.000 | Fulfillment 900.000 | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Flat | 1.000.000 | 10% from the revenue they deliver | 59.000 | 90.000 |
Acceleration | 1.000.000 | 4% from revenue 0 - 60 0.000 19% from revenue 600. 001 - 1.000.000 25 % from revenue over 1.000.000 | 23.600 | 81.000 |
Minimal Quota | 100k | 0% from revenue up to 600.000 10% from the total revenue while exceeding the minimum quota | 0 | 90.000 |
It’s crucial, but sadly quite often neglected, to formalize your commission scheme so that you and the sales representatives have a clear overview and calculation of the expected sales target, what they had already delivered, and what kind of commission they can expect from it.
When introducing it, sit down having enough time planned, and explain the goals and reasons behind the calculations. Give expectations and specific examples of how it can be reached - by new sales, renewals, inbound, etc. Make it as concrete as possible so that the sales representatives believe they can fulfill it.
Wrap up
Always stick to having your sales compensation schemes realistic (aka achievable), comprehensive, and easy to calculate.
Pay attention to how many people actually hit their goals and get their compensations. If the number is low, you either need to deliver some extra training to improve the sales team’s performance, or you set your target expectations too high.
Otherwise, it’s not going to take long before your sales team starts to crumble. Reaching sales targets boosts your team’s morale, so give them all they need to hit it.
They win; you win.