Companies have been shifting
will impact sales effectiveness and revenue results. It’s ex- citing to think that, post-crisis, you could actually increase your team’s productivity and results by focusing travel on impactful face-to-face meetings and redefining how to increase the value of customer interaction.
• Leverage the same idea for your account coverage. As you’re looking at territories and aligning the right salespeople to the right opportunities and optimizing territories, break down the geographic barriers. Think bigger and differently. You no longer have to be lim- ited by drive time and geographic density – and that opens up new sales coverage and market penetration opportunities. This crisis allows you to test some new virtual coverage approaches you can continue post- crisis to the benefit of you and your customers.
• Change your offers or partner with other organi- zations. As you’re looking for opportunity, you may consider modifying your offers or products to better fit evolving customer needs. If customers aren’t buying your products, what can you offer that will help them? Also, consider partnering with other companies in your industry or outside of your industry to create new offers. This may be a time to look at unlikely partners you wouldn’t have considered before, such as com- panies with complementary products or even com- petitors who are open to cooperation. This is a great time to step back and think strategically about your business and what partnering can offer you.
• Form a customer ideation team. Determine how your company can help customers and find new opportunities. Rather than operating from your own perspective, engage customers in this ideation so you can get their insight and test ideas. Consider pulling together leadership of complementary companies for a virtual roundtable to understand what they and their peers are doing at this time. This can help strengthen you as a solution provider for your customers.
ASSIST THE SALES TEAM FINANCIALLY Finally, we get to the point that many thought was the primary solution: sales compensation relief. Once you’ve worked through your complete Challenge Question, you can take a look at the sales compensation plan. Directions to explore may include: • Create short-term bonuses for attaining key mile- stones. What keeps your business moving ahead? It may be creating proposals, testing prototypes with custom- ers, or building pipeline. Look at the milestones (which, preferably, are customer-acknowledged to minimize rep inflation) and link them to progressive bonuses.
• Adjust sales quota timing. We are not recommend- ing that you reduce quotas yet, but rather shift their seasonality. So, you may consider weighting quotas toward the back-end of the year to allow reps time to catch up once we pass the COVID-19 curve. By doing
from in-person meetings to video conferencing as a norm, and this is a great time to expand this with your customers.
this you are also, in effect, adjusting earlier-in-the-year quotas and making them more achievable now.
• Adjust sales quotas. If catching up is not possible by year end, consider reducing quotas as a backup mea- sure. Two principles come into play here. First, you are invoking a policy of quota adjustment because the situ- ation is clearly out of the rep’s control. You are setting a precedent by adjusting quotas. This has to be within your compensation governance so you don’t set the expecta- tion that it will happen again unless there is a situation of similar magnitude. Second, instead of making a broad quota adjustment for the organization, do it in a targeted fashion based on the situation in each territory.
• Lower performance thresholds. If your sales com- pensation plan has performance thresholds (e.g., a rep has to reach a certain percent of quota before earning compensation), consider lowering that threshold point to ease cash flow. If a large portion of your organiza- tion performs at or around quota, lowering thresholds essentially creates a pay advance for compensation they will ultimately earn. However, keep in mind that, in this situation, a group could fall short of quota – making this an additional expense.
• Test your options. Evaluate them not only for their ability to provide financial relief, but also for their ability to move your organization ahead. By moving ahead, we mean addressing other ideas to solve for your Challenge Question, such as building pipeline or advancing a better customer value proposition.
• Financially model your compensation solutions. Once you create targeted sales compensation solu- tions, financially model them under a range of sce- narios so you understand your risks and expected investment. Consider this within the context of the other investments you plan to make as you solve for your Challenge Question.
As you can see, using Sales Design ThinkingSM to move
beyond your problem statement to a better Challenge Ques- tion can fundamentally change the way you think about this COVID-19 setback and help you come up with a much better answer. Your response and leadership in this environment will set the tone and settle your team to concentrate on moving ahead and helping their customers solve problems.
Mark Donnolo is managing partner with SalesGlobe. Michelle Seger is a partner with SalesGlobe. For insight and ideation around this challenge, contact us at
mdonnolo@salesglobe.com or
mseger@salesglobe.com.
SELLING POWER APRIL 2020 | 25 © 2020 SELLING POWER. CALL 1-800-752-7355 FOR REPRINT PERMISSION.
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