The competition is trying to poach one of your top players. Another superstar is threatening to leave. Your top two are wrangling over territories and making the John Cena gesture at each other in sales meetings. It’s as bad as the recent NCAA drama. What’s a leader supposed to do? Well, there’s a lot you should be doing. Ensure your assigned territories make sense. ( See my previous blog post .) Align your compensation with your strategy and market. (That’s a future blog post.) Lead by example and behave professionally. (Hmm, let’s put a pin in that, too.) Enough of the shameless self-promotion, let’s tackle another aspect of leading salespeople to championship performance: Incentives and Bonuses. Salespeople are coin-operated. Not that other aspects of their role don’t motivate them, but money really motivates them. So does customer satisfaction, the thrill of the chase, and beating the competition out of an order. However, for now, let’s focus on Sales Incentives and best pr...

The Challenge – How to Incentivize a Distributor Photo from zazzle.com Purchasing Professional After writing tons of articles on the sales process in distribution where I brutally vilify purchasing and procurement types, I received an email with the following: “Frank, you often make sweeping generalizations about purchasing types. As a former sales guy, I tend to agree with most of what you say. However, my organization (a distributor) has a couple of purchasing people. And while I certainly don’t push them to lie, cheat or steal from our vendors, I would like for them to be more proactive in helping our business make money. Do you have any recommendations for points we should intensify them on? Is it possible for them to do more than just enter orders with our suppliers?” This was a very good question and one I hadn’t thought about for quite some time. There are many purchasing folks working in distribution. These folks are critical to our organization. Most are har...