The Complete Guide to Sales Force Incentive Compensation: How to Design and Implement Plans That Work

Description

A well-designed and implemented incentive program is an essential tool for building a motivated, highly effective sales force that delivers the results you need. Incentive programs are seductively powerful but complicated instruments. Without careful planning and implementation, they can be too stingy to motivate, too complex to understand, too quick to reward mediocre results, and too difficult to implement. The Complete Guide to Sales Force Incentive Compensation is a practical, accessible, detailed roadmap to building a compensation system that gets it right by creating motivating incentives that produce positive outcomes. Packed with hundreds of real-life examples of what works and what doesn't, this important guide helps you: Understand the value of building an incentive plan that is aligned with your company's goals and culture. Avoid the common trap of overusing incentives to solve too many sales management problems. Measure the effectiveness of your current incentive program, employing easy-to-use tools and metrics for pinpointing its weak spots. Design a compensation plan that attracts and retains successful salespeople, including guidelines for determining the correct pay level, the best salary incentive mix, the proper performance measures, and the right performance payout relationship. Select an incentive compensation plan that works for your organization -- then test the plan before it is launched. Set territory-level goals that are fair and realistic, and avoid overpaying the sales force or demoralizing salespeople by having difficult goals or not fairly assigned. Create and manage sales contests, SPIFFs (Special Performance Incentive for Field Force), and recognition programs that consistently deliver the intended results. Manage a successful transition to a new compensation plan and build efficient administration systems to support your plan. Filled with ready-to-use formulas and assessment tools and a wealth of insights from frontline sales managers and executives, The Complete Guide to Sales Force Incentive Compensation is your hands-on, easy-to-read playbook for crucially important decisions.

Andris (Andy) Zoltners is Founder and Co-Chairman of ZS Associates, and a Frederic Esser Nemmers Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, where he had been a faculty member for more than 30 years. In 1983, Andy and former Kellogg colleague, Prabhakant Sinha, founded ZS Associates, a global leader in sales and marketing consulting, outsourcing, software and technology. Andy's areas of expertise are sales force strategy; sales force effectiveness; sales force size, structure and deployment; and sales force compensation. He has assisted over 250 companies in over 20 countries and across a wide range of industries including healthcare, technology, transportation, and financial services. Andy has spoken at numerous conferences, has taught sales force topics to several thousand Executive, M.B.A. and Ph.D. students, and continues to teach executives at the Kellogg School of Management. He has published more than 40 academic articles, edited two books on Marketing Models, and has co-authored a series of books on sales force management.

"[The authors] wrote a definitive book on this topic... I highly recommend it." -BusinessWeek Online "Andris Zoltners, Parbhakant Sinha, and Sally Lorimer wrote a definitve book on this topic, The Complete Guide to Sales Force Incentive Compensation: How to Design and Implement Plans that Work (Amacom, 2006). It's about 500 pages long and costs $65. That may sound expensive until you realize that's the cost of about 30 minutes of consulting, and less than the price of one 'please don't leave us to work for our competitor' lunch, I highly recommend it." --Michelle Nichols, BusinessWeek.com columnist "[The authors] wrote a definitive book on this topic... I highly recommend it." -BusinessWeek Online "Andris Zoltners, Parbhakant Sinha, and Sally Lorimer wrote a definitve book on this topic, The Complete Guide to Sales Force Incentive Compensation: How to Design and Implement Plans that Work (Amacom, 2006). It's about 500 pages long and costs $65. That may sound expensive until you realize that's the cost of about 30 minutes of consulting, and less than the price of one 'please don't leave us to work for our competitor' lunch, I highly recommend it." --Michelle Nichols, BusinessWeek.com columnist