The sales industry is ever-changing as new techniques and technologies arise, but a number of myths and misconceptions about sales have stood the test of time. In this blog, we’ll be debunking some common myths about sales.

High-pressure techniques are required to close sales

A number of sales team members and leaders believe that they need to be a ruthless negotiator and apply a lot of pressure to prospects in order to close a sale, but this is not the case. More often than not, closing a sale comes about as a result of a good process and the right prospect, but there is no special technique required. While creating a sense of urgency is important for your prospects to take action to commit to an order, this should come at the end of the sale in the form of a gentle nudge. The more time you spend building a relationship with a prospect, the more natural it will feel to nudge them in the right direction at the end.

Sales team members need to be extroverts

A professional sales team is usually made up of both extroverts and that each bring their different skills to the table. While an extrovert will have the ‘gift of the gab’, an introvert will use active listening, reflection, and curiosity in order to close a sale effectively without dominating the conversation. While extroverts have a number of behavioral advantages when it comes to sales, they could stand to benefit from the techniques of your more introverted team members by asking more questions, listening effectively, and channeling their enthusiasm.

It’s better to start at the top

While it may not have been true in the past, sales teams are beginning to realise that customers in growth markets, or middle-sized customers, present a better proposition than those at the top. Competition in mid-sized markets is less fierce, which can make deals more profitable. Decisions in mid-sized businesses are often made more quickly and the decision-makers are usually more accessible, which can make the sales cycle much shorter.

Managing a sales team requires a lot of patience and can be extremely stressful. If your business is in its early stages, you might be feeling out of your depth, so we’ve put together a list of 4 sales team management tips so that you can lead your team towards success.

Specialize early to grow sales

Your sales team is made up of individuals who each have their own skills that can contribute to your team in a positive way. It’s essential that you identify those strengths and weaknesses early on and segment your team accordingly as you grow. It’s also a good idea to ask your team members about their personal preferences – do they prefer to build rapport with small businesses or are they better at going after bigger leads? Your sales team will have the best chance at success if they are all utilizing their own unique skills.

Focus on training

Continuous training is essential to ensuring that everyone in your team is constantly up-to-date with their skills regarding product knowledge, prospecting, territory planning, professional communications, and opportunity management. Consistently developing the fundamentals of successful sales techniques should be a key element of your company culture so that sales performance goals and standards are met consistently throughout your team.

Be results-driven and offer incentives

When you’re growing your sales team, it’s essential to hire people with determination and drive that thrive in a transparent environment that is focussed on key sales metrics. When you gather a group of competitive people together to meet the same goal, it drives your entire company upwards. It’s important to emphasize the importance of results so that people are more focussed on productivity rather than activity.

While straight monetary incentives are great, you should also look at the “money can’t buy” options like gifts, gadgets and trips of a lifetime like a safari in South Africa.  Find out more about Cape Town Tourism here.

Use the volume-versus-value ratio

Your highest value team members (highest paid) should be focusing their time on the lowest volume activities that are the most important, such as securing partnerships and referrals and building relationships. Your lower value team members should instead be focused on higher volume activities that are less important, such as turning prospects into leads.

To fulfill your business’s potential and motivate your workforce, get in touch with our team at Commissionly today for more information about our sales commission software.

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.

Sales compensation is a tricky thing for some companies, who’re reluctant to give away profit. But sales commissions can benefit your company in a number of ways.

Commission is motivating

The idea that staff should prioritise the company above their own interests is a nice one, but it’s simply not grounded in the facts. Motivation is essential if you want staff to perform at their best. Remember that for a lot of people, more money is a strong motivator.

And, naturally, your sales staff are the team you want to motivate the most. Without them, your business can dry up fast.

Commission means more revenue

Companies that object to a commission-led environment usually see the size of commission payments from their industry and wince. However, they’re not thinking in terms of what those commissions really mean.

Imagine paying out $100,000 a year to your top salesman. Now that’s a LOT of money, for sure. To a small business, it’s a massive payment. Nigh impossible. But now imagine that this salesman has made you $2,000,000 in revenue; then, $100,000 is just his cut of 5%. Would you get rid of that salesman? Of course not!

Don’t think of commission… think of just how much bigger the revenue will be to the company.

Commission gives more certainty

Measuring results gives employees and companies more certainty. It’s motivating for staff to know exactly what they’re contributing to the company. This motivation is intrinsically linked to the company’s success.

Reviewing staff performance for many businesses is too subjective. They grade staff according to how they ‘think’ they’ve performed. This can be awkward for the company, and frustrating for the staff member who’s put in years of extra work but doesn’t get rewarded because ‘subjectively’ the company isn’t sure how their work is paying off.

Commissions require specific tracking, which lets everyone know where they stand.

Commission attracts the best staff

The best salespeople thrive on competition and measured performance. They want to excel, and to be rewarded for excelling.

In a commission environment, you’re giving your staff everything they need to thrive and reap the rewards. The best salespeople will go where the rewards are, so you give yourself a better chance of attracting them. Commissionly is the first step.

Yes, sales commission software is a great aid for calculating and tracking how much is owed to your staff. And if you choose the right program, you enable your salespeople to track their own progress in real-time.

However, the software now available can do so much more than just track and provide live updates on sales compensation figures. It can also offer team leaders and financial management information that will facilitate sales forecasting. This same data can also be used for planning strategies.

Increase sales efficiency

Leveraging the Cloud for software programs is the way to go. Programs can easily integrate with other applications. This provides you with a powerful tool that can improve the efficiency of any sales operation. Enabling frontline staff to keep tabs on their commission, creates incentives that drive sales staff to greater heights.

Linking accounts into the loop makes the commission payment process much more manageable. It also provides managers with important information relating to running costs and the impact on profits and losses.

Access the benefits of built-in CRM

If you choose a commission software program that incorporates CRM, it can really revolutionise the sales process. When your sales team uses the dashboard to update their sales compensation progress, they can also access all sorts of other data. This data includes; who orders what, how frequently they order, who the main contact points are, what the accumulative spend is, etc.

This is all insightful information that your salespeople can have at their fingertips. Managers and team leaders can share the same information. Using this, they can create strategies and assemble sales targets.

If accounts are tied into the data too, they can use it to drive their cash flow predictions. The more integration that takes place, the bigger the potential efficiencies and benefits.

Software for all industries

Commissionly sales commission software has been expressly designed to create benefits and efficiencies in industries across the board. By including the Zapier App, you can integrate seamlessly with as many as 2,000 apps and programs, including the likes of Hubspot, Insightly, Quickbooks, Sage, Salesforce, and Xero.

If you are not yet using Commissionly sales commission software, it’s about time you started. For more information, contact us and set up a free trial today.

Are you thinking about installing sales commission software? If so, the one thing you don’t want to have to do is to reinvent the wheel. You want a program that you can tailor to your exact needs. It will make life so much easier.

Here are three things to look for:

1. Software that runs the way you want it to

Each business has its own way of doing things. The end goal is always the same, but the way it needs to be achieved is always very specific depending on the business. This is a universal problem, which is why sales commission software is flexible to suit your needs. When you choose the right package you will be able to enjoy the advantages already built-in. And experience far less hassle maintaining the system.

Take manager overrides for example. Many companies grant their sales managers small override commissions on the sales their teams make. This is something that can be easily set up in some of the leading sales commission software programs.

2. Out with the old and in with the new

A lot of businesses still use spreadsheets to calculate sales commissions. There is nothing wrong with spreadsheets per se. However, they do take time to set up and maintain. In addition to which they are not easily shareable and are error-prone in terms of inputting data.

By switching across to a specifically designed program for capturing and calculating outstanding sales commissions, you can make life a whole lot easier. Easier for both management and employee too.

Calculations will be error-free. With each member of staff being able to get real-time updates. As a result, everyone can measure their performances against their targets.

3. Integrate and share data

There is something else that is very attractive about the latest sales commission software. It integrates with most other existing systems, and it’s easy to install. Leading state-of-the-art software will also integrate with other disciplines. It can be linked to customer relationship management and accounting software. Sharing data in this way obviously has many benefits.

If you would like to discover more about how you can tailor the latest sales commission software to your business needs, contact us or peruse our website for more information.

For anyone just venturing into the world of business or just starting a new company, the term ‘commission tracking software’ may just seem like confusing jargon. However, for any sales-based enterprise, investing in effective commission tracking software could make a world of difference.

What is commission tracking software?

Put simply, commission tracking software enables you to track all of the crucial parts of the commission cycle. From tracking and calculating commissions to ensuring that they’re carried out to the clients’ requirements, commission tracking software can aid in the process at every step.

Why invest in commission tracking software?

1. It minimises human error

Although you can, in theory, track commissions via spreadsheets yourself, this leaves the door open for errors. This is because there are things that may slip past even the most meticulous person. In contrast, commission tracking software works through algorithms and trends, so the potential for error is minimised.

2. It frees up team time

Usually, when you start out, you will have just a small team of employees. These employees could be at the top of their field, and yet they still will not have enough time in the day to get everything done. Handling their own figures and working out how much commission is owed can be a time-consuming process. So investing in commission tracking software that will get the job done for you can only benefit your team, right? It allows your employees to spend their time focusing on the important jobs – like locking in sales.

3. It enhances your sales commission model

Unless you’re a seasoned commission expert, there might be a chance that you’re unsure how to actually structure your business model. What should you prioritise? What sales goals should you set? These are just two of the many questions that may arise when thinking about this. Luckily, commission tracking software is intuitive and versatile and can help devise solutions to a plethora of questions that you may have. This means your business model will be optimised and functioning at its best!

Choose Commissionly!

Commissionly is the sales commission tracking platform that beats all others. It offers a wide host of tools and features, such as sales splits, multi-currency support, recurring commission management, and more. Explore the full range of features today, or else get in touch with a friendly member of our team.

The talent you employ in your organisation is what drives your sales team’s success. Talent and underperformance are integrally linked. Without hiring the right people, you can expect to have a higher level of staff turnover and lower retention.

According to statistics, the average UK turnover rate (across all industries) is about 15%. However, sales teams can expect to have a turnover rate of 31%, more than double the average. There are a few reasons why employees might leave their sales position:

– Better sales commission at other organisations.
– Poor performance at their current job.
– Conflicts with management.

The problem is that recruitment can be costly financially and also to the efficacy of the team. It can cost near the equivalent of a year-and-half of the employee’s wages to replace an employee and get the new team member to full productivity.

So, for a £20,000 employee, the cost to replace them could be £30,000. If you have 10 people in your sales team, then replacing them at a rate of 31% could be a bill of, at least, £90,000 a year.

Employ the right people

Importantly, you need to look at employing the right people. Higher staff turnover is often because there is a mismatch between the business’ and the employee’s goals or values. A mismatch leads to a disillusioned staff member who won’t perform at their best.

Improve staff retention

It’s not all doom-and-gloom though. There are ways to improve staff retention. One such way is setting sales performance goals that are simultaneously realistic and challenging. This gives salespeople, who are traditionally very competitive, a reason to keep on pushing to meet sales targets.

You should also look at offering a sales commission that is fair to the salesperson for the work it takes to close a deal. If an employee thinks that the work isn’t worth the pay, they will likely look to move to another company, which will make them less enthusiastic about pushing sales for you.

All of these mean that staff retention is an important metric that needs to be monitored. Too many staff leaving your business will cost you significantly, which will severely impact your profits. And without the right sales commission software helping you to set sales goals and monitor performance, then your task will be harder.