B2B Sales Compensation
Redesign your Sales Compensation Plan
Most sales compensation programs offer insufficient rewards for meeting company objectives or overcompensate for the wrong results. We get it. Making changes can feel incredibly risky. But waiting to eliminate inefficiencies will only erode profits and let unrealized sales languish while you worry about how to realign without disrupting the apple cart.
How We Can Help You Effectively Realign Your Sales Compensation Plan
Over the past quarter-century, Indian River Consulting Group has redesigned sales incentive programs for hundreds of distributors and manufacturers in dozens of industry verticals. Thanks to our knowledge of incentive mechanisms, organizational dynamics, industry trends and proven implementation strategies, we can be a valuable contributor to any incentive design project team.
Build a Framework
We ask questions that determine the balance of risk and reward to the proportion of objective-driven income and volume-driven income.
Avoid Upsets
Our sophisticated modeling techniques involve sales reps in the planning process and sidestep common pitfalls.
Customize Your Plan
There is no silver bullet or “best” sales compensation plan – we work with you to design a plan that is in line with your company’s goals.
How we’ve helped distributors and manufacturers like you
We stepped in to help a distributor that lost its largest customer to bankruptcy immediately after renewing a lease in that region. To incentivize new business – fast – and minimize cumulative loss, we changed its sales incentives to reposition the salesforce on new growth and disincentivize existing business.
We helped a distributor revamp its sales comp plan to incentivize growth in mid-sized accounts and disincentivize focus on their top accounts, which data showed inside sales could manage most of the time. This shifted their attention from protecting business to scoring new business.
We worked with a distributor to solve a margin problem that was caused by sales reps who were willing to slash prices to get the business. We helped them build a plan that would incentivize increasing margin on each account, reducing reps’ focus on price.
Sales Compensation Resources
5 Best Practices to Guide Your Sales Compensation Redesign
For salespeople, the top predictor of income should be performance, not tenure. But all too often, it’s the other way around. The truth is traditional sales compensation plans that...
Sales Compensation Plan Best Practices in an Uncertain Market
As the pandemic continues to change the way salespeople interact with customers, forget about bandaging disruptions to old sales compensation plans. Instead, seize this moment as an opportunity to...
Have Your Salespeople Hit the Compensation ‘Point of Diminishing Returns’?
I’ve worked with dozens and dozens of distributors and manufacturers over the past couple of decades, and in that time, I’ve heard more times than I can count that...
Read this whitepaper to learn about how to maintain the tried-and-true motivational compensation upside while also providing the predictable monthly income that Millennials desire.
Most wholesale distribution field sales reps are still doing things the same way they were done back in the ’70s. Why has the field sales function remained largely unchanged? How can you ensure the money you’re spending on field sales reps is being spent wisely?
Learn a better approach to sales compensation than a plan based purely on net profit. Mike Emerson provides a closer look at how distributors can incorporate key profit drivers into a program without taking the full territory net-profit plunge.