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or sales professionals, this uncertain time is prompting a lot of fear and reaction. We see it each day with the clients we work with across indus-


tries. With the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s been a lot of talk in particular about how to address sales compensation since the envi- ronment has suddenly threatened revenue and reps’ earnings.


Companies and consultants alike are reactively throwing around sugges- tions like paying spot bonuses, lowering goals, and raising commission ramps. Unfortunately, reacting and taking broad actions to address a specific issue – or taking sporadic action on the sales compensation plan – might not help the situation. That’s because you’re only addressing a symptom and not solving the real problem. A better way to move forward would be to tap into the collective intelligence of the sales team with what we call a Challenge Question. For instance:


“How can we address sales organization fears, enable our sales team to help customers through this crisis, find real growth opportunity, and assist the sales team financially?” Doesn’t that sound more productive? If you work your Challenge Ques- tion further with your team, you’ll come up with more idea nodes to explore, yielding more possibilities. Let’s take the ones we’ve highlighted above and brainstorm some ideas from those.


SALES ORGANIZATION FEARS The root of this crisis for the sales organization is not revenue or com- pensation. It is fear. Fear of results and the implications for compensa- tion, while at the same time starting to see those results happen with the pullback of the economy. So let’s look at fears. For the sales organization, brainstorming possibilities may bring up directions to explore such as:


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