When it’s time to analyse sales performance goals, many business owners are often intrigued by the thought of doing away with commissions and paying employees a fixed wage. Maybe it’s a rough patch in the market or the idea that salespeople are not keen on jobs where salaries can fluctuate.

But whatever your reasoning may be, sales commissions are a critical element when it comes to devising a strong business plan. Here are three reasons why sales compensations are invaluable for corporate growth:

1. Motivate workers to make more sales

You may expect your employees to be committed to the future of the organisation. While this can be effective, you still can’t hope for workers to always perform at their peak with nothing but company goals to motivate them.

Your employees, like all humans, are certain to have their bad days. This is especially true when it comes to sales and marketing, where workers can face rejection and extreme competition throughout the day.

The stress factor can run high while they continue to make call after call while you figure out how to calculate sales targets based on their performance. A sales commission system can encourage sales representatives to focus on meeting specific sales goals, and enjoy rewards that they can grow and monitor through the business sales commission software.

2. Enhance team performance

A healthy and competitive work environment is essential for sales representatives to work towards the future together as a team. By fostering a competitive workplace that doesn’t clash with the company culture, employees are incentivised to perform their best when working towards achieving common goals.

This means that the sales goals met by each individual worker must come together to form unified targets that contribute to both departmental and overall corporate goals.

3. Analyse and recognise performance

Today’s sales departments are highly competitive environments where employees are happier for the value-based acknowledgement they receive from their peers. By recognising the sales performance of your workers, you pave the way towards better customer service, engagement and productivity. And since strong sales performance management can boost employee performance, it can actually be the difference between a successful and a losing marketing department.

Commission tracking software can play an important part in this, as it can be used to study the output of individual employees and create sales goals for the future.

The days of using tedious Excel sheets to keep track of sales commissions are long gone. Today’s digitally savvy companies are moving forward with commission tracking software to spur their employees towards higher standards of performance and growth.

This type of software makes it possible for companies to assess each sales rep’s progress, predict future sales numbers and analyse the effect of renewals while keeping an eye on the status of their sales performance goals.

Managing employee commissions manually is a difficult and time-consuming task. Here’s what you should consider when switching to sales commission software that will work for you :

1. User-friendly

The right commission tracking software can boost not just your profits, but also your efficiency and overall workplace productivity. In order to achieve this, your chosen software needs to be simple to work with and have user-friendly features.

It must be easily operable and assist employees to produce high-quality results in a short space of time. It shouldn’t be too complex to install and must allow users to import information from other financial software already available in the workplace.

2. Functionality

This is one of the most important features to look for when purchasing sales systems. A professional commission tracking software should be able to process data from several business sources and work well together with any current software that you use.

It must be able to assist you in carrying out complicated business calculations and important analysis. The software needs to make your sales computations easier to handle and keep payments accurate. Finally, it must also be able to present all the processed information in a manner that’s easily understood by the company’s key decision makers.

3. Integrate with existing systems

The new sales commission software that you choose must be able to function well with your current systems. It must be able to access, share and transition information in a number of different formats and stay compatibly connected to other financial software systems in your workplace at all times.

4. Flexibility

Manually handling your employees’ sales performance and tracking their commission is a daunting task. This is because you need to work with several collections of financial information and spend hours of your time comparing datasets, all the while figuring out the best way to present every piece of information. But with a strong commission tracking software, you should be able to track and compare several large datasets quickly and with minimum effort.

The right software package for your business must be flexible, allowing you to choose your preferred method of processing information and adjust statistic views in ways that suit your business purposes.

The sales compensation plan is one of the most effective recruitment tools in the sales industry. When establishing your strategy, you need to ensure that it offers measurable benefits to your sales team, but you also need to ensure that it isn’t costing your business huge sums of cash every month. It needs to be fair, but appealing, and sustainable

Avoid full commission

There are some circumstances where this type of structure works but, for the most part, full commission is typically only beneficial to sales staff that can’t get other sales jobs or someone that doesn’t require a full time income. Do you really want to entrust your sales to these types of salespeople?

Reward positive behaviour

Some compensation packages fail because employees that miss targets, and don’t meet their employment requirements, continue to receive commission for their sales. This basically means that they are being rewarded for failing.

Offer incentivised rewards for behaviour that you want to see repeated. This also means targeting the goals that are important to your business – if you want to attract more long-term business, offer additional compensation for customers that sign up and stay with the business for the next 6 months.

Choose the right commission level

Commission rates can vary from 1% to 10%, as a typical rule. Use existing sales figures and bear in mind that a good rule is that your top salespeople should be earning as much from their commission as they do from their basic salary. Use this guideline to determine the amount of commission that you pay. 

Pay quickly

Paying commissions quickly will feel like an additional bonus to your salesforce. The perception of reward is greater when the reward comes hot on the heels of the success. The brain recognises that it is being rewarded for the recent action it performed, so people will be more inclined to make additional sales and reach additional goals, if you pay quickly and reliably.

Be transparent with your team

Whatever commission rate, payment terms, and other commission structure you decide on, ensure that you communicate the details with your team. You can also use your sales compensation software to provide individual reports to every one of your sales team. Regular reports enable your salespeople to identify their strong and weak points, so that they can make improvements, or continue to provide the best results for their efforts.

A sales compensation plan is the most crucial driver of success in any sales operation. Therefore, you have to develop it strategically to promote the right sales and evoke the desired practices from your sales representatives.

Though a perfect plan will look different for every organisation, you will need to follow these necessary steps and best practices to create a unique, strategic sales compensation plan:

Establish a business objective

A perfect sales compensation plan should be strategically aligned with the objectives of the organisation. Thus, you must first identify your business objectives before setting up a sales compensation management system. You will need to work with the executive stakeholders to identify the strategic goals of your business. This cooperation will help you create a compensation plan that emphasises measuring and incentivising performance to support the organisation’s objectives.

Identify the roles of sales

With the right business strategy in place, it’s time to perfect your sales force. Point out the sales roles that you will add to the commission plans. Each sales role in your organisation will require a specific compensation plan.

Current customer-focused sales roles include accounting managers, customer success managers, sales development representatives who focus on prospecting and account executives who focus on sales acquisition. Within these roles, you can develop senior and junior positions to fairly compensate your employees.

Define and align your sales objectives

There are many goals you might want to achieve. For example, when defining your sales objectives, you may need to expand the market share by a certain amount, introduce new products or increase revenue by a specific amount. You must, therefore, identify all your sales objectives so you can produce the right incentives to aid those initiatives and ensure your compensation plan succeeds.

Your sales goals should also be closely affiliated with your specified business goals. By tactically aligning your sales and business objectives, you can make sure your salesforce is impelling success at an organisational level.

Determine the pay structure

Aligning your sales and business goals can also help you drill down into the particular structure of the compensation plan. To do this, you have to determine the pay mix, target pay and upside potential for every sales role.

If you’re trying to see a difference in your business returns, then what better place to focus on than your sales? It sounds simple, but managing sales properly can be an arduous task, as every business owner knows only too well. There’s just so much to do – monitoring KPIs, distributing leads, proper sales performance management… the list goes on.

Using professional software may well be the way to combat your sales management troubles. These tools can give your company an edge over the competition while unlocking limitless opportunities for growth and success.

The best of these software can not only aid you in tasks such as budgeting and commission tracking, they can also help you decide how to set sales targets and quotas to achieve future business goals. Here are the top four benefits your business can gain by investing in quality sales management software:

1. Proper account regulation

Your sales management system can serve as a useful database that holds together all of your business information and sales accounts. This will allow you to handle as many accounts as your business needs without any risk or hassle.

Strategically managing your accounts this way will also help you identify accounts that promise the most revenue and have them ordered to suit your priorities.

2. Commission tracking

Commission tracking software is one of the most useful features you can expect from a sales management system. This is because the more employees you have, the more you come to realise that using different spreadsheets to track every last sales commission is just not a practical solution.

Using professional software will provide you with great options such as a sales commission dashboard and sales compensation calculator to keep your business transactions flowing smoothly and error-free.

3. Create sales goals

A sales management software system will allow your sales reps to focus completely on making more sales without burning energy on administrative tasks. With the system holding all the information they need, the sales team will be efficient when selling products and services to target consumers. And with access to sales goals software, they will be more likely to succeed when deciding on how to best approach the company’s sales performance goals.

4. Reports and analysis

Using sales management software will help you track the success of every sales and marketing campaign launched by the business. This will tell you if your efforts have produced enough sales conversions and traffic to meet your goals. And by studying these reports, you can identify any shortcomings present in your strategy when initiating a new campaign.

It’s a fact of life that a happy workforce is a more efficient workforce, and one thing that can affect morale in a sales environment is inaccurate data leading to not getting paid the correct commission. 

With a sales commission dashboard feature, your sales reps will be able to track their commission in real time.

While all business managers will look at targets and goals in relation to the quantity and quality of sales, the majority of sales reps will be focused on their individual pay packet. That may sound like bad business, but if you have a clear commission structure you don’t need to have your reps overly care about your business as the pay will be more than enough to motivate them.

This is where good commission tracking software can come into its own. It can be all well and good having a well-organised commission structure in place, with the benefits which can come from that. Though if the data is inaccurate and reps aren’t paid what they feel is correct, all the good work implementing that commission structure in the first place is for nothing. Having the statistics monitored for you in real time and with accurate data will help you improve morale.

It is another fact that all businesses run on data, none more so than in a sales environment, thus if you have more accurate data it will improve your business. Commissionly offers this while also helping create your sales goals. It will then keep track of where you are in relation to those sales targets while at the same time improving morale, with reps knowing they are going to get paid for the work they do.

The reps will be able to see where they are and will be able to look at what they need to do to push that little further if they are short of where they would like their commission to be. Accurate data at your and your reps’ fingertips in the dashboard will help them push for more sales and hence help your business.

While it’s true that Excel and other open-source spreadsheet apps are useful for collecting, tracking and manipulating data, the truth is that these programs were never designed to be a catch-all for all of your company needs – and they’re far from being the best choice for processing or tracking sales commissions.

Yes, Excel can number crunch and perform powerful mathematical equations. However, commissions processing is more than just mathematics. Your sales performance management needs to be accurate, allowing you to identify things like missed commission payments or missed targets. It should help you understand how to create sales goals and implement sales performance management.

If you’re still using Excel, here are just a handful of reasons why you should consider switching to sales commission software :

1. Spreadsheets are error-prone

While apps like Excel or OpenOffice allow you to use custom formulas to help calculate sales commission, there’s no accounting for the fact that human error can and does happen. Incorrect data entry, accidental deletion, and forgetting to save (auto-save isn’t implemented in older versions of Office) can all cause huge issues. These errors can be eliminated by switching to commission tracking software.

2. Spreadsheets are time-consuming

Why spend hours processing commissions in a spreadsheet when you could do the same task in next to no time with dedicated commission tracking software? In a worst-case scenario, the administrator of the commissions spreadsheet could even start rushing things to get the job done quicker, resulting in the sort of errors discussed in the previous point. Ultimately, this means that employees could miss out on their commission – and this could cause arguments or upset company morale.

3. Sales performance management is important

There may be instances where you want to audit the past payments you’ve received – and there’s really no way to achieve that with a spreadsheet. Sales commission software allows you to check monthly payments, commission percentages and individual sales rep payments.

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 even benefit from a free trial with a demonstration on how to improve your sales performance management. With a host of other 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.

The sales environment has always been competitive but now you can get ahead of the game by switching to the cloud. If you haven’t thought about a cloud-based compensation management solution yet, maybe you should. Here are three simple reasons why :

1. Quick, easy and cost-effective

The only things you need to switch to cloud-based sales commission software is an internet connection and a computer, laptop or mobile hardware on which to access it.

Unlike traditional office IT, you don’t even need your own server, which helps you save on costly resources and storage space. Installations are on-boarded remotely, and data is stored on the cloud, providing a secure back-up of your organisation’s information in case of an in-house system crash.

That makes switching to the cloud very low risk on all fronts. The software does the work and saves you money, while you and your team focus on building sales and revenue.

2. Accessible from anywhere

As soon as sales commission data is hosted in the cloud, it becomes accessible day and night from anywhere in the world with a Wi-Fi connection.

That means your in-house team can view live sales data as travelling representatives access the sales commission dashboard and update their successes on the road. Team managers can check the performance of individual reps in real time in order to make project decisions. Great performance can be reliably rewarded, while under-achievement can be tackled quickly to ensure better results next time. 

3. Great for team-working

Cloud-based sales systems are especially useful for start-ups and small to medium-sized businesses. They can be scaled up and down to meet changing needs and are flexible enough to pull in team members from all over the county, country or even globe.

Cloud-based software integrates seamlessly into existing sales projects and brings your whole sales team together under one ‘umbrella’. Everyone can track sales commission opportunities and achievements online in order to optimise results. Reports and commission payments can be generated quickly and easily, ensuring that timely reward builds sales motivation.

So why not close the deal, get ahead in the cloud, reward your sales team and grow your profits today?

This concept can sometimes be neglected when the management focus is on the overall picture. But, with modern sales performance management apps providing tracking insights and commission reports, a clear focus on individual performance is also valuable.

Calling out individual performance within the team

Professional sports team players are prone to say: ‘We win as a team, we lose as a team’. A cynic might say that the quote surfaces more often after the latter! The best coaches know that each player’s performance adds to, or detracts from, the overall team capabilities. 

Our Sales Commission Software app is a valuable tracking tool when assessing individual sales territory performance. Gaining such insights is particularly valuable in two situations:

# The team as a whole is successful, but one or more individuals within it are not

# Individuals put in a good performance, but the team as a whole does not attain its sales target

In the first scenario, under-performing individuals can escape censure. The leader is simply happy with the overall success and doesn’t want to ‘rock the boat’. In the second situation, a leader might give the whole team a hard time, and fail to positively recognise those who bucked the team trend and performed well. 

Sending the wrong signals to the team

Either of the above actions can cause on-going problems. The successful performers feel they don’t receive enough credit or attention when the overall picture is less positive. They could become unsettled and start to wonder if there are other employers who might appear to value them more.

While poorer performers begin to realise that it’s okay to carry on as they are; the more effective team members might wonder if they should accept that a less strenuous performance seems to be accepted.

Delivering specific and consistent performance assessment

A team works well together when each individual knows that their performance will be fairly assessed. A key to this is to use specific data to clearly demonstrate their main strengths or to highlight and help, through a manager’s own insights or training, with any weaknesses or difficulties. 

A truly valuable management tool

Our cloud-based Commission only sales commission software app is a highly valuable tool in providing leaders and managers with the information they need in setting and managing sales targets, ensuring performance-driven results, and delivering the necessary level of feedback to individuals.

Contact us now to learn how it can help your business.

There are times when a few minor adjustments to sales compensation management are all that’s needed to add insight and incentivise your team.

Occasionally, in-depth analysis and major change are needed to breathe new life into your sales performance goals. Whether the adjustments you need to make are large or small, decisions around business software are critical.

Get it right and you stand to revolutionise your business and your sales. Sit back and do nothing and you could be missing out on a whole range of powerful, automated benefits.

1. In-depth understanding

Unlike traditional spreadsheets which are susceptible to human error, automated software tracks and analyses raw sales data in a totally reliable and comprehensive way.

However complex your operations, once the facts have been input, executives can tap in for an in-depth understanding of how their teams are achieving day-to-day, produce reports and commission payouts. Employees can rely on their sales data to accurately reflect their successes. When you stay informed, great things can happen. 

2. Motivation

Nothing is more useful to sales team leaders than having accurate information about individual staff performance in relation to commission tracking.

They can see at a glance how the work of each individual is impacting on department performance. That means they can dedicate their resources to identifying and supporting reps that are falling behind.

It is easy to look for patterns of achievement and add extra motivation when it’s needed to reach a particular sales goal. For instance, if one rep is great at closing sales for a particular service or product, a manager can tap into their skills in order to train others and build success across the whole team. 

3. The here and now

Unless you have money to burn and an army of super-accurate data inputters, the smart money is on web-based sales commission software. It means that your performance indicators, sales records and analyses are always up-to-date, and you can log into your data from anywhere. You know exactly where you stand, you can assess what the future holds, and you can plan ahead for the benefit of your business.

Sales commission software isn’t just for the bigguns. Small and medium-sized businesses are now able to invest in specialised automated dashboards that strip away the guesswork. If you are looking for increased productivity, escalating sales and a motivated team, check it out.