Hey Alo, thank you! It’s a question that could take quite long to answer in detail. Let me try a condensed version.
- From what I’ve seen, sales is tough. Probably not too many of us who would sell day after day without receiving any pay. So, the rewards should be there, and usually it’s achieved by aggressive bonus system. Agressive in a sense that if you bring money in, you will be paid, if you don’t, you won’t. 100% commission is tough for many, of course, but so is sales. So, there needs to be a respective driver and reward.
- Strong bonus helps hire people that are willing to enter this sort of arrangement, and keeps away the people that look at sales as way to “meet people and make acquintances”. It’s a goal-oriented and a process-oriented job which needs to be executed first, and mastered, second. So, I would hire the ones that would be willing to dive in and develop in that order.
- Sales, luckily, looks like a fairly even playing field (at least at the beginning of a month or quarter with everyone at zero
). This is where competing comes in. Yes, people need to get paid and that alone motivates them in sales. But, so does kicking someone’s butt. I would put together a number of activity and result goals to ensure there can be many winner categories and make sure that the recognition of on-going effort does not go unseen. I’ve seen what a physical gong does in a room of salespeople when one of them goes for a hit after a successful close. I’ve also seen how important it could be to be closing in midway through the week to someone ahead in interim results. People are at different levels of skill and are triggered by different competitions, so multiple metrics to compete on is a great way to engage everyone somehow.
There’s more about each of these things, of course (in terms of detail of how one could build it up), but hopefully it helps along.