Dear Coach:
We're just beginning to emphasize selling. How much incentive should we pay?
Coach says:
We need to talk in order for me to give you good advice on pay. To start, though, I urge you not to pay "incentives," at all.
Look the word up in the dictionary, and you'll see that incentives are something that "induces action or motivates effort." Paying your people incentives creates two major problems.
- It sends the message that you believe they need an external motivation to sell. Believe me, they will live down to your expectations!
- In order to keep sales up, you must continually reinvent those incentives. This also sets the stage for lots of in-fighting between product groups or departments, who jockey for permission to offer the best incentives.
A strong sales culture is full of self-motivated salespeople who regard themselves as professionals; even when only part of their job is to sell. And what do professionals get for sales? They earn commissions.
So call what you pay on sales, "commissions." This small difference in title can make a huge difference in performance. |