David Wudyka discusses the focus on teams for revitalizing pay plans in a BLR webinar entitled ‘Commission Pay Plans: How to Motivate Your Sales Staff in a Roller Coaster Economy’. He explains that another step that organizations can use in revitalizing their Commission Pay Plans (CPP) involves focusing on teams rather than on individuals. More information regarding the use of this approach for revitalizing CPPs is provided below:

• Recessions can be the perfect time to consider the advantages of a team-based selling approach
• Selling in teams with different employees focused on producing or qualifying leads, making sales calls and presentations, handling service issues, and related tasks forces your sales reps to act in the common good, with every action they take aimed at building customer loyalty, not individual sales goals
• Team selling requires a fresh look at compensation, since some team members will be actively engaging in sales, while others are actually offering sales support
• You must promote and reinforce the team approach 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year, to make it work

With the traditional model of individual sales reps competing against each other for business, each sales person ‘owns’ his or her book of business, and the focus is on earnings and not the organization. By shifting to a team-based approach, your organization will then own the business, and you can minimize your exposure to threats like sales rep turnover while also maximizing your flexibility in managing sales compensation in general.

David Wudyka, SPHR, MBA, BSIE, is the founder and managing principal of Westminster Associates (www.westminsterassociates.com), a Massachusetts-based human resource and compensation firm that specializes in pay, performance, and productivity issues. He brings more than 30 years of professional HR and compensation experience to the table for clients around the country.