Optimizing sales commission rates is a critical aspect of running a successful business. By setting fair and incentivizing commission rates, you can motivate your sales team to achieve better results, increase revenue, and boost overall profitability. We will be exploring some of the best practices for optimizing sales commission rates by industry.

 

1. Know your industry standards

Before setting your sales commission rates, it’s important to understand the industry standards. This information can help you set realistic and competitive commission rates to attract and retain top sales talent. Each industry has different commission rates which is why it is important to always do your research.

 

2. Consider your sales team size

The size of your sales team can also impact your commission rates. A larger sales team may require lower commission rates in order to remain sustainable, while a smaller sales team may benefit from higher commission rates to compensate for the lower volume of sales.

 

3. Consider your target market

The target market for your products or services will also play a role in determining your commission rates. For example, selling to businesses may require a higher commission rate than selling to consumers.

 

4. Assess your products or services

The type of products or services you offer will also affect your commission rates. For example, high-ticket items may command higher commission rates than low-ticket items, as they require more effort and expertise to sell.

 

5. Evaluate your sales process

The length and complexity of your sales process will also impact your commission rates. A shorter, simpler sales process may require lower commission rates, while a longer, more complex process may require higher commission rates to compensate for the added effort and expertise required to close the sale.

 

6. Consider the level of risk involved

The level of risk involved in your sales process can also impact your commission rates. For example, sales of high-risk products may require higher commission rates to compensate for the added risk.

 

7. Evaluate your competition

It’s important to consider your competition when setting your commission rates. If your competitors are offering higher commission rates, you may need to adjust your rates to remain competitive and attract top sales talent.

 

“What do you need to start a business? Three simple things: know your product better than anyone, know your customer, and have a burning desire to succeed.” – Dave Thomas, Founder of Wendy’s

 

Once you’ve taken these factors into consideration, you can begin to set your sales commission rates. Here are some best practices to keep in mind:

 

1. Offer a base salary in addition to a commission

This can provide a safety net for your sales team and help ensure they have a stable income, even when they don’t hit their sales targets. Knowing that they have a basic income will give them the motivation they need to do even better.

 

2. Set clear and attainable sales goals

Your sales team will be more motivated to achieve their sales goals if they have a clear understanding of what they need to do to earn their commission. Be sure to set achievable goals that are realistic given the current market conditions.

 

3. Provide regular performance reviews

Regular performance reviews can help you track your sales team’s progress and ensure they’re on track to hit their sales goals. This can also provide an opportunity to adjust commission rates as needed to ensure they remain fair and motivating.

 

4. Offer bonuses for exceptional performance

Offering bonuses for exceptional performance can provide additional motivation for your sales team and help them stay engaged and motivated. A bonus will provide a more rewarding system for your employees to work towards.

 

5. Be transparent about your commission structure

It’s important to be transparent about your commission structure, so your sales team knows what they can expect to earn. Be sure to clearly communicate the commission rates and any bonuses or incentives you offer.

 

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.” – Steve Jobs, Chairman and CEO of Apple Inc.

 

In conclusion, optimizing sales commission rates is an important aspect of running a successful business. Planning out your own commission sales structure will benefit your business in the long run. Implementing software such as Commissionly will also make the process a lot smoother and easier.

 

“On any given Monday I am one sale closer and one idea away from being a millionaire.” – Larry D. Turner

Having a well-structured commission plan is one of the most important parts of commission sale success, it is one of the major issues a business leader encounters.

A sales team can be the distinction between stagnation and success. Ultimately assisting in sales acceleration and developing a reputation for rewarding and recognizing excellent staff performance. We will be going through some answers to your question “How can I achieve commission sale success?”.

 

1. Establishing Reasonable Quotas, Regions, and Goals for your Sales Team.

Maintaining some strict yet achievable standards and goals can help you and your sales staff stay on track. When the company’s objectives are vague, unrealistic, or both, the allure of a respectable sales commission can seem tantalizingly and frustratingly out of reach.

Since both require calculating the customer ratio and, consequently, the number of possible prospects to be contacted, quota management and territorial setting frequently go hand in hand. Establishing these criteria is a simple task when using a solid sales management software system.

The actual procedure and achieving the ultimate goal, meeting targets and earning sales commission, becomes easier when a workforce is aware of what they are meant to be doing and why. Another way to look at this is to say that the employee has cause to protest if there is a sudden and inexplicable deviation from goals and targets.

Sales reps prefer not to spend too much time trying to understand excessively complex rules and useless text. Their concentration and progress are maintained by giving them the tools they require and facilitating the simple reading of important reports, including weekly, monthly, or quarterly leaderboards. Implementing a software system such as Commissionly is a fast way to help your staff track and understand the company’s ultimate goal.

“Never quit. It is the easiest cop-out in the world. Set a goal and don’t quit until you attain it. When you do attain it, set another goal, and don’t quit until you reach it. Never quit.” – Bear Bryant, American college football player and coach

 

2. The Right Timing, Product, and People are Your Baseline to Success.

Determine your target market first. Make sure the item or product line fits a specific demand, whether the target audience is distributors or a single buyer. Apply consumer personas, consider a client’s lifestyle, and try to put yourself in their position. Establishing a relationship with your customer is highly important especially when it comes to spending time and energy attempting to convert the lead.

Figuring out your competitor’s market can also make or break you. This will determine if you are wasting your time on a certain area or customer and can give you a better idea of which way to go. This leads to the question “are you and your staff attempting to maintain a fair price?”. Being conscious of the stakes can make or break a business. Is there a chance to sell more items? Is it possible to set a price to close a deal without sacrificing profit, and how will this affect sales commission?

“A product is something made in a factory; a brand is something that is bought by the customer. A product can be copied by a competitor; a brand is unique. A product can be quickly outdated; a successful brand is timeless.” – Stephen King, American author

 

3. Empowering Your Team Without Relying Solely on Sales Commission.

Motivating your team will go a long way in reaching success. At the end of the day, the sales team is the engine of the entire business. It is not only about the money for your team but also inspiring them to take the step further to succeed and reach their full potential.

It is impossible to emphasize the significance of training and development. Making your staff better and more confident in their roles will make them better at sales and negotiating, so building in the opportunity to learn new skills during the work week or to improve on ones they already have—is more than just checking a box and not learning anything new.

Additionally, make sure your sales team has a thorough understanding of the culture and values of the organization. Understanding these and putting them to use in a role with excitement and knowledge is what transforms a routine job into fulfilling employment at an organization they’d be pleased to work for.

“Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers.” – Seth Godin, American author

4. Rewarding Your Sales Team.

Another way to help motivate your team is to define a reward system for those who have overachieved standards in the company. Some forward-thinking businesses have had success getting their staff to perform better by considering their sales force as a portfolio of assets that demand various levels and types of care. An increasing number of studies show that the core performers are driven by various aspects of compensation plans.

While some salespeople are more skilled and internally driven than others, this is not universal. That is why your sales department will get a substantially higher return on its efforts if your sales compensation plans take into account the various needs of various salespeople and are founded on actual data rather than assumptions.

“Cybersecurity is growing like crazy and demand is off the charts for good salespeople. Too many startups are focused on immediate dollars, not thinking about the long game or retaining clients when it’s time to renew that subscription. Prospects can see this from a mile away. Your commission structure should, of course, reward net-new sales but balance that with client success and retention.” – Andrew Barnett, Vice President of Verodin

 

These are just a few ways how to become incredibly successful in your sales department. In any industry, the sales side is the support to the entire business so having a happy sales team and setting goals will help establish your company for the up-and-coming future.

Most companies don’t take their salespeople as seriously and in that way receive poor performances and low profits. Take a step further and help your team feel more grounded and special as they will return the respect they are given.

Commission management software provider Commissionly has announced its new service for merchant service providers, ISOs, and payment processors.

The Commissionly Payments platform is a tool created for businesses that need to create reports and manage commission payments on terminal sales, rate agreements and transaction reports.

This versatile platform is tailored towards businesses and individuals working within the payment processing chain.

Commissionly’s payment functions were created with the intention of removing Excel from the equation. The platform has automated many of the traditionally manual tasks, such as Auto Assignment of Merchant IDs – link Merchant IDs to any internal data such as ISOs, Sales Agents, or Merchants. Commissions calculations based on terminal unit sales or transaction volumes with the ability to split between the house and other sales parties.

A full custom reporting engine can output the information Payment companies require to manage the commission payments.

Martin Baker, Commissionly CEO, said: ” We start where processing companies finish – the sales and transaction report. It expands businesses ability to manage and control the inflow of fee data across multiple activities and sources. Clients can use Commissionly to pay their agents and independent contractors in a fraction of the time that it would take to do manually making Commissionly a must-have piece of software for any card payment professionals and ISOs.“

To request more information on the new service, you can book an appointment with a Commissionly Payments Commissions specialist today, by going to their website: https://commissionly.io/commission-management-software-for-merchant-service-providers/

If you manage a remote sales team, it can be hard to ensure you communicate effectively with your team. Through phone calls and emails, important pieces of information can often be lost, making it essential you have a strong network of communication with your sales reps. Below we offer top tips for improving communication with a team of remote workers.

1. Set communication schedules

If you do not set a specific date or time to call an employee, you will most likely keep pushing the call further and further down your to-do list until the communication becomes long overdue. At the start of each week schedule the times you would like to speak to your employees, whether individually or as a team, and stick to it.

2. Have an office calendar

When working remotely, it is easy for an employee to be missed off a meeting list or email chain and fall out of a communication loop. Create an online calendar that can be viewed and added to by everyone in your sales team, so every employee knows when important meetings are. If an employee notices they are not being included in a meeting or event, they will be able to raise this with you.

3. Use sales performance management software

When managing an online team, organising individual sales commission is an extremely time-consuming and confusing process. Instead of allowing emails about commission to interrupt the communication flow of your business, you should use sales performance management software which will automatically manage your sales team’s commission. This will allow you to communicate with your employees about more specific work matters, as all issues about commission will be handled for you.

4. Offer a platform for feedback

You may wish to create a separate company email address for team members to send their ideas and feedback to. This ensures general comments and suggestions don’t get lost in daily communications.

Contact Commissionly

If you’d like to learn more about sales performance management software, or more ways to improve communication within your team, contact Commissionly today!

We have, in this blog, spoken many times about the value and necessity of sales goals. It is essential to not only have something to strive towards, but also to set out goals that can form a baseline for future performance; without having such goals in place, progress can easily stall, and improvements can be difficult to ascertain.

However, while sales goals should be an integral part of every business with ambitions of growth, there is little to be gained from setting goals that are wildly optimistic or simply unattainable. So, with that in mind, here is a quick guide on how to set sales goals that are realistic.

1. Consider what your company needs to succeed

Every organisation has its own targets and growth ambitions, and it is absolutely vital that these are taken into account when setting sales goals, as you need to ensure they are specifically tailored for your operation. By doing this, you will also be able to ascertain whether or not your current team has to capacity to attain the sales figures you desire, meaning you can be made more aware of whether you need to start hiring additional staff, alter your ambitions, or whether you’re already well placed to succeed.

2. Utilise the correct measurements

You need to consider more than simply how much money each salesperson is bringing in (though, of course, it is vital to keep this in mind always). You also have to look at progress – whether sales performance improves over time – and sales awareness – whether the individual is able to ascertain whether or not a lead is worth pursuing. By doing this, you will be able to set targets for specific employees, and also provide them with necessary training if required.

3. Consider time

A key issue that afflicts many companies is that they vastly overestimate the amount of time that employees will be able to spend working on hitting sales targets. It can be very easy not to consider sick days, weekends, and holidays, as well as how much time will be taken up each workday by attending to emails, partaking in internal meetings, and conversations – work-related or otherwise – with colleagues. Try to figure out – as best you can – the average length of time it takes to convert a lead, and make this one of the core factors in your goal setting.

We listen to our clients’ suggestions and respond by constantly improving our Software.

Introducing the new feature: ‘Suspend User Module’

The suspend user means a company can stop processing commission for a staff member who has left, but still keep their commission data up until their suspension date. When they are suspended it frees up the licence so it can be used for a new person.

Previously when you suspended the person, it would still process their commission and the licence still counted. This meant you had to delete the person to free up the licence. but then you lost all their historical commission data.

Once you have suspended a user, the only way to unsuspend is to contact our support.

If you’re currently using a spreadsheet to calculate commission, and you’d like a simpler, more efficient way to manage sales performance, why not consider Commissionly? You can benefit from a free trial with a demonstration on how to improve your sales performance management. With a host of powerful features, like sales territory management, sales quota management and sales objective management, you’ll soon find yourself wondering how you ever managed with a simple spreadsheet.

Are you a growing ‘start-up’ business looking to increase your sales growth?

Sales commission schemes are a great way to get your employees putting in extra effort towards reaching their sales goals. However, it is difficult to decide on the type of incentive you should offer your staff, especially if you are relatively new to the scene.

1. Design your sales commission scheme appropriately

Explain to your employees that alongside their base salary, the sales commission scheme will grow and develop alongside the business’ success. Therefore, the greater effort put in early on would prove beneficial to all.

This is a useful way to start as it will be based on the real numbers being achieved, as opposed to a number sucked out of thin air.

2. Be careful with stretching goals

Offering audacious goals or targets beyond 100% can be a great way of getting staff already achieving to push themselves even further. However, if someone is struggling to meet targets this may cause further frustration. It is important to be optimistic but also to be realistic. And tailoring these ‘stretched goals’ to the individual will be far more effective in the long run. This is because people don’t work the same or have the same motivation. So essentially you’re helping them help you.

3. Properly incentivise your sales team

There can be a lot to calculate when starting out, and an easy mistake is to offer an incentive that is either too low to adequately motivate, or too high that you end up out of pocket.

Using sales commission management software is a fantastic way to alleviate these time-consuming tasks, therefore giving you more time to build your sales team’s confidence and ability. You can continue to recalculate commission rates with the software as your sales team grow in success and your profits rise.

So it is important to maintain a commission structure that works best for everyone through using real-time performance figures. ANd here at Commissionly, we offer many useful software packages and tools that can make the running of your business much more seamless. Our software is able to calculate complex commission values efficiently and accurately that can be tailored to the needs of your business.

When it comes to sales performance goals, there are many different aspects to consider. One of those is the current trading conditions of the industry. For most industries, there are going to be times when there are slow periods.

During these times, it can be hard to motivate your team. Sales teams that aren’t motivated will often fail to meet sales performance goals. And this can be a problem in the long-term.

If this happens, your business’s performance can be worse than expected. And some staff might think they’ll lose their jobs during one month of bad performance.

The key to this is to keep motivation high when times are tough. So, how do you do this? Here are some of the top solutions.

1. Non-monetary rewards

A great option is to add non-monetary rewards. These can be applied to work such as the time spent on the phone, adding new leads to the database, etc. Such a reward need not be linked to the conversion of sales (that is “rewarded” with sales commission), it is rather rewarding tasks that may be neglected. Keep in mind that such tasks can still be monitored in sales performance software.

Some Good examples might be an extra hour off at lunch or food hampers. Having some non-monetary rewards, allow for the effectiveness of the sales commission to still be maintained.

2. Run team-building exercises

Team building exercises can be a great way for your team to come together and face the slow times as a community. They can build communication skills, learn vital selling skills and even have some fun. All of these build on the effectiveness of the sales team.

It’s also good to arrange team-building exercises during quiet periods. Then you won’t disrupt the successful run of sales and restrict the team’s earning potential. It also means they could exceed sales performance goals and feel better about their skills.

3. Good leadership

The importance of leadership is really vital during slow periods. A good leader will continually communicate with their staff and remind them of their skills and/or value during the good and bad times. You can use comparisons to the past year’s slow period and show any sign of sales improvements since then.

Leaders should always be present. Team members can feel more confident when they see the leadership team taking an interest in their everyday work. When out and about, talk to your team and ask them how they are going. You can offer guidance on how they can improve and meet sales performance goals. And if you are unable to be in the office together, then do the same through conference calls, emails, etc. The team needs the communication, while stuck at home, more than ever to get through bad times.

All businesses have good times and bad times. During the good times, you should push them to maximise results. This ensures that during bad times, you can build on the skills of your sales team and keep spirits high, preparing for the next busy season.

Incentive compensation is a form of pay structure which is based upon how the business and its individual employees perform. Essentially, employees receive a base salary with an extra reward (tallied up using a sales compensation calculator) for meeting specified targets. There are multiple performance metrics that can be used to determine which employees qualify for commission.

Create and track incentive compensation

When developing your incentive compensation plan, your decision-makers will need to work hard to create a system which attracts the best sales talent, motivates and encourages the right business decisions. However, incentive compensation plans can become complicated, particularly when they involve several different performance measurements – or if you have different employee levels, for example. Your sales compensation calculator within Commissionly can help speed up the process.

The benefits of incentive compensation

Incentive compensation is incredibly effective when it comes to encouraging desired behaviour in employees. It allows organisations to promote upselling, incentivise customer interaction and the use of a variety of different sales techniques.

Here’s how a sales compensation calculator within our compensation software could help your company to benefit:

Help align your incentives with your business objectives.
• More likely to meet long-term and short-term targets of the business.
• Focus attention on the behaviours and working culture of the business.
• Encourage your teams to plan ahead and highlight any expectations.
• Attract more sales-driven candidates for vacancies within your business.
• Save money related to salary rises through the allocation of funds for when goals are achieved.

Creating the perfect incentive compensation plan

While incentive compensation is a great concept for improving productivity, it can be difficult to implement without the right commission calculation software.

It’s virtually impossible to manage different commission parameters with manual systems or spreadsheets. This is where a sales compensation calculator comes in. With our commission calculation software, your organisation can ensure that employees are rewarded accurately and on time, to help keep them motivated to continue hitting those all-important sales targets.

For more information on how Commissionly could help you to develop your incentive compensation strategy, please do not hesitate to contact us today.

High employee turnover among your sales team can be toxic to your whole business. And unfortunately, it’s an issue that affects a huge number of organisations. There are a number of factors that can be at the root of this problem and, more often than not, they’re linked to sales performance management.

Here are 3 of the most common causes you may need to address;

1. Over-the-top expectations

Sales, by nature, is a high-pressure area to work in and no one ever applied to a sales job expecting an easy ride. However, when your sales team has over-the-top quotas and expectations hanging over their heads, it should be no surprise that people start jumping ship.

Quotas should always be challenging in a way that gets the most from your team. But they should never be impossible.

As a starting point, analyse your sales targets and compare them against your team’s output. From there, you can set targets that will still get great work from your sales team, without sacrificing (vital) morale.

2. Uncompetitive compensation

Compensation is obviously a major factor in sales performance management. With salary and commission being such a fundamental part of sales work, perfectly competent sales managers can be at risk of missing the forest for the trees in this area.

Obviously, the ever-changing landscape of your industry will mean that simply offering higher basic wages or commission is not always an option. But this is never an excuse for poor compensation that isn’t as good or better than what your sales staff can get elsewhere.

Be sure to assess how you’re compensating your staff regularly, both in terms of salary and commission, and various benefits and frills.

3. Poor training

Your bright new prospects won’t last long if they’re not given adequate training. A hardcore sink-or-swim method of sales performance management can make some salespeople thrive, but they will always be the minority. For the rest of your team, this will only cause stress and more errors, leading to a negative snowball effect.

Be sure to invest in thorough, personalised training to get the best results from your team members. More importantly, remind them that they are an asset; worthy of investment and long-term personal development.