By Roger Paulson, Sr. Researcher and Practice Director
ncentive-compensation programs are a seductively powerful and essential tool for building a motivated, highly effective sales force that delivers revenue results.
But they are also complicated instruments. Pay insufficient attention to planning and execution, and your plan can be too stingy to motivate, too complex to understand, too quick to reward mediocre performance and too difficult to implement.
At the June 2008 meeting of the CRM/Sales Operations Peer Group, Eric Maurer of The Alexander Group, a leading consulting firm in the area of sales-compensation strategy, shared leading practices and gave practical advice gleaned from experience with the firm’s clients on designing effective incentive-compensation plans.
In addition, member company Schneider National discussed their recent major revision of sales-compensation plans and key learnings they acquired along the way (read Tina Bryson’s comments about using M2M Advising in the process). Following the presentations, the facilitated discussion focused on how UWEBC member companies have developed their incentive-compensation plans, including the challenges they’ve encountered and the practices they’ve found to be most effective.
As always, the Peer Group meeting was thoroughly documented. The full range of resources produced at the meeting—including PDFs of minutes and presentations, as well as Web-enabled Mediasite video—is available on our Web site to all UWEBC member companies.
