What Is The Best Way To Reward Salespeople?

If you’re a salesperson – what do you believe is the best way to pay you, and incentivise you? If you are a sales manager or HR manager in charge of remunerating salespeople, what are your thoughts?…

This is a fascinating discussion on a blog I recently visited. I highly recommend you check it out here…

For my part, most, not all, but most of the time, I believe 100% commission based sales is for entrepreneurs who are looking to build and or run their own business. All the risk and ‘skin in the game’ is with the entrepreneur/business owner…..who is also the salesperson.

That’s what my own business model is….and it’s pretty motivating!

But when you’re an employee salesperson……I’m wondering where the ‘shared risk’ is if a business owner, sales manager, or HR manager decides that they only want to remunerate the salesperson with 100% commission based sales.

Now, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t pay by 100% commission. What I am saying is you need to understand the potential consequence of that.

For many salespeople if the biggest issue they’re thinking about all of the time is how can they pay their basic bills (food, mortgage/rent, utilities and getting from a to b) then they’re probably not focusing on how they can create value for prospects and existing clients when they sell what they sell.

Sure……you might increase their ‘hunger’ for the sale…..but at what cost?

On the other hand, if you pay a ‘wage’ that is easily covering the ‘basics’ for the salesperson, and there is no consequence for under-performance, then this too just breads apathetic salespeople.

I found the comments by the many contributors to the blog great reading……I hope you do too……you can check it out here if you haven’t already and would value your thoughts here on this blog as well.