Insights from the Webinar: Go for Growth

Our recent webinar with Modern Sales Pros was a deep dive on enabling revenue growth by optimizing commission plans. Over the past year we have seen the market push companies to focus on profitability and sustainable revenue; in this environment, commission plans can be a helpful lever to improve sales productivity. We regularly meet with companies which have seemingly straightforward commission plans. Once we dig deeper, we often find that these plans incentivize behaviors that distract reps and leave opportunity on the table. Here are some insights from our expert panel, which included Palette’s VP of Sales, Sarah Silberfeld, as well as Andrew Morton, CRO at UserVoice, and Jordan Shaheen, Director of Revenue Operations at Candid. 

The panelists started off discussing how to identify the right metrics for commission plans in the context of optimizing for revenue growth. There is no silver bullet. There are always plenty of KPIs; it’s the responsibility of the executive team to distill these down into what’s most important for the business. Andrew explained how the key to finding the right metric for commission plans lies at the intersection of this top-down prioritization from the business strategy, and the buyer experience and sales process. What are the activities that add value to buyers and help move them along? In between this and the business strategy, we find our selling tasks. From the selling tasks, we identify habits we want to incentivize through the commission plan. Once this is all defined, we can start building motions for this whole process. 

Conversely, when the commission model doesn’t align with the buying experience, we end up with sales activities which are not helpful to the buyer and a commission plan which doesn’t provide value to the salesperson.

How can companies manage the complexity of closely aligning their commission structures with their business objectives? Sarah pointed out that even straightforward commission plans quickly become complex as sales leaders need different mechanisms to motivate high and low performers, meet short term objectives, or incentivize work on experimental projects. Leveraging an automation tool allows companies to manage this complexity without extra time or overhead. 

The full webinar provides frameworks for thinking about your comp plans and tips to help make improvements. You can watch the full recording here.

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