In case you haven’t noticed, we have been doing a lot of research on the topic of commission-based compensation plans.  During the discussion, topics from Daniel Pink’s Drive, The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us keeps coming forward.  I recently re-visited parts of the book and wanted to share a few points to further ramp up the discussion of the matter.   The common belief is summarized by Pink this way:  “Rewarding an activity will get you more of it. Punishing an activity will get you less of it.”  This certainly falls in line with the sentiments of distributor managers.  When we asked the question,"Why do you employ commissions with your sales department?" the answer came back to drive both quality and quantity of effort (in that order.)  One-on-one examination of many plans revealed instances where distributors had applied greater rewards for selling select groups of products as well as rewards for selling into poorly performing or in...

Some might call it eavesdropping, but we call it our uniquely unscientific methodology for tracking distributor trends. We listen. Plus, we get phone calls, emails and occasional text messages from distributors. When we hear the same topic mentioned more than a dozen times in the course of a month, we know the topic is coming to the surface. For some reason, the topic of sales compensation is showing up --- repeatedly. Here are a few questions I believe are pertinent to any thinking directed to the topic. Point One: Do you see you sales efforts becoming more team focused? • Do you see your business employing more or fewer people in the sales function in five years? (Potential new positions might be Specialists, Project Managers, Customer Crib/VMI maintainers, Tele-sales, Application Engineers and others.) • Do you believe a well-developed team could sell more than semi-autonomous salespeople? • Do you believe your current outside sales force will be or should be part ...