Tag Archives: Commissions

Modeling Commission Calculations in Excel

During a recent consulting engagement I found myself once again re-inventing a formula in Excel for modeling commission calculations to estimate the cost of the plan at various points above and below 100% attainment.  This task is complicated by the infinite variations … Continue reading

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Size Matters for the Top Sales Leader’s Comp

CEOs, CFOs and CROs are usually very involved in determining the on-target earnings (OTE) for the Sales leader role and they understand that the size of the Sales team matters.  In addition to size OTE is driven by competition for … Continue reading

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How to Convert Your Regional Targets into Better Rep Quotas

Let’s assume for a minute that your Board of Directors and executive leadership have agreed on a strategy for the coming year. This strategy usually includes specific strategic goals (e.g. revenue targets). Let’s further assume that your Finance organization has … Continue reading

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Measuring Sales Operations – A Selfie

Sales Operations teams typically produce and analyze dozens of metrics and KPIs related to the productivity of the sales team or qualitative measures regarding other aspects of Sales.  Rarely is qualitative and quantitative analysis focused on measuring Sales Operations.  We never take a selfie … Continue reading

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Three Ways to Better Focus Your Sales Comp Plan

One approach to improving the focus of your sales comp plan is to carefully manage the number of components your commission plan includes.  Since fewer commission plan components result in a more focused plan, how do you reduce them while maintaining alignment … Continue reading

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You’re hired! A check list of things to consider next…

Walking into any new job, let alone a sales management job, can be overwhelming unless you have a plan.  There are a number 90 day plan for new manager templates available but these are by necessity generic in nature.  For those … Continue reading

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Sales Incentives: the Puzzle of Motivation

This 9 minute video by Dan Pink, author of DRiVE, is a humorous and enlightening white board presentation on how the same incentives can be either effective or ineffective depending on the circumstances.  I know a number of sales managers … Continue reading

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Elements of a Commission Plan – Plan Components

This is my second post on the topic of sales incentive compensation.  I need to outline these basic elements of a commission plan to set the ground work for future discussions so please bear with me. Like a three legged … Continue reading

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Software Sales Compensation Design

At least once every year we all need to create/review our incentive compensation strategy. It’s all too easy to assume last year’s plan will work again in the coming year and, even if it did work, there is evidence that some … Continue reading

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