“Our people are our most important asset.”

I hear that a lot. Company leaders talk tirelessly about the importance of attracting and retaining top talent. They tout efforts to create a happy, productive workforce that rewards high performers for jobs well done.

Many leaders do a great job. But far too often, the best people quit. This is especially true in sales, where 35% turnover rates dwarf the overall average turnover of 13%. While it’s partially due to a sink-or-swim landscape, many sales managers are actively driving away their best reps with unfair rules, non-transparent policies, ever-changing comp plans, and mindless busywork.

Here are the top reasons your best-sellers are quitting:

They don’t understand their comp plan

A sales comp plan needs to be straightforward and easy to follow. When salespeople truly understand how much money they can earn, they’re more likely to be motivated to smash quotas and strive for valuable bonuses. It’s hardly a new idea. Economists have been arguing for simpler sales comp plans since the 1980s.

They spend too much time on non-selling activities

Salespeople don’t make companies money by attending meetings, updating spreadsheets, or filling out documents. They make money closing deals. Just one hour per day spent on non-selling activities cuts earning potential by 12.5% (based on a 40-hour work week). But many organizations exceed that stat. Gartner reports that number is closer to 16.4%.

Their comp plan changes frequently

Does it seem like your comp structures change a few times per year? That can happen for a number of reasons. Perhaps you hired a new sales director. Perhaps you changed the high-level goals of the organization. Whatever the reason, sudden changes to comp plans feel surprising and unfair. They could be the catalyst for a strong salesperson to leave your company for good. It’s fine to change your comp plan, but make sure it’s absolutely necessary before going through the headache of a change.

They don’t receive their comp plans until March

When sales reps are forced to wait weeks — even months — for sales comp plans, they can feel forgotten and insignificant in the eyes of upper management. Plus, they won’t know which metrics to shoot for. That’s a serious demotivator.

They’re underpaid

Nobody comes to work because it’s fun. They come to work to make money. If sales compensation is insufficient, don’t expect reps to go the extra mile to close deals. Do some research with Glassdoor or PayScale and make sure you’re aligned with your area.

They don’t have a solid, clearly laid out career path

People want to learn and progress. In fact, 82% of employees say a lack of career progression would lead them to quit their jobs. It’s critical to provide training and growth potential. High-performing sales organizations already do this, and they’re twice as likely to provide ongoing training as low-performing ones.

They have the rules changed on them mid-game

Salespeople want to be rewarded for demolishing sales quotas. If you are reducing commissions or increasing quotas simply because your team is overachieving, it can feel like they’re being penalized for doing a good job.

Their quota is unrealistic

Top sales reps will catch on pretty quickly if there’s no legitimate chance at reaching quotas — then leave your organization as fast as possible.

Their commissions are capped

Payment caps can be deadly to a sales team. They remove any incentive for sales reps to continue selling after reaching quota. Uncapping earnings keeps reps motivated throughout the entire month or quarter, and ultimately leads to increases in sales.

They see poor performers sticking around

Keeping reps on staff who can’t produce decreases competition and sends a message to the team that it’s okay to be mediocre.

In fact, 78% of high-performing sales organizations will terminate a poor performer within a year, compared to 52% of underperforming sales organizations. Companies want high performers who challenge one another so everyone performs at high levels. Top companies hire slow and fire fast.

Their commission payments are late or delayed

Salespeople want a square deal. When payments are late or delayed, it feels unfair. It also hurts their ability to financially plan — and can lead them to run for the door.

Their travel arrangements are restricted

Sales reps work nights, weekends, and travel often. In fact, 83% wish they could spend more time with family and friends and 51% say loved ones tell them they work too much. So when they’re on the road, treat them right. They don’t need lobster dinners and fancy hotel rooms, but skimping on travel could make them grow weary of management.

They’re being micromanaged

It’s often said that people don’t quit jobs; they quit bosses. If a manager is constantly looking over a sales rep’s shoulder, the rep is not going to be very happy. In fact, 68% of people who’ve been micromanaged say it decreases morale, and 55% say it hurts productivity. Instead, empower your salespeople to make key decisions and think entrepreneurially.

When salespeople understand their comp plans, they’re more likely to stay motivated, crush goals, and feel supported by management. QuotaPath helps them calculate and automate commissions in a quick, easy way organization and like their on the right career trajectory. If you haven’t checked us out, it’s free to sign up and start tracking your commissions today.

Working remotely changes the dynamic of a sales team in so many different ways. Communication can no longer happen in person so tools in your tech stack like Zoom and Slack have become not just convenient but crucial for operations. Data in Salesforce or HubSpot must be accurate and updated in real-time to ensure prospect and customer communication isn’t negatively impacted.

The sales commission and bonus process is not immune to this either and is arguably the single biggest factor for making or breaking a distributed sales team. Between communication and data, there’s a greater chance for human error or results getting lost in translation.

Now more than ever, empowering your team to understand how they are getting paid is crucial for establishing trust between reps and leadership. As a manager, this should be your primary tool for motivation and driving good behavior. This is challenging even for teams working in the same building, so being remote-only amplifies this. So, how do we connect the dots between money in the rep’s pocket and business value so that we can have a connected, motivated, aligned team in this new remote world?

Single source of truth for sales commissions

As we’ve all seen over the last few weeks, working remotely adds an extra layer of disconnect when it comes to communication. For something as important as paychecks, you simply can’t afford to have a difference between expectations and reality. Creating a single source of truth for how and why your reps are getting paid is crucial. I’ve talked to hundreds of reps who track their commissions in one spreadsheet while their finance and ops team tracks it in another. When these two numbers don’t line up, it’s demotivating and creates animosity between sales and finance. This is completely avoidable if you’ve established a single source of truth which both sales and finance trusts.

QuotaPath is your source of truth for all parts of the business. We give your reps real-time insights into their earnings while giving finance and operations the administrative control and reporting they need to ensure accurate and effective compensation. We connect seamlessly to Salesforce so there’s no duplication of records and data.

Understand your path to success

Most reps do not understand how they get paid. It’s a simple and sad truth. It’s also a massive opportunity for organizations who can bridge this gap. Empowering reps to understand what they’ve earned and what they could earn in a given period gives a line of sight to their personal success. Self-motivating without the collective energy of a sales team around you is difficult. Being able to visualize the finish line and understand how your daily activity connects to your paycheck is a game-changer.

QuotaPath’s Earnings Dashboard gives your reps a detailed breakdown of how and why they are earning commissions. Reps and managers can easily forecast in real-time to see exactly what deals get them to the finish line for individual quotas or team goals. Jacquie Bigot, Account Executive and QuotaPath power user, uses the product to align personal and company goals.

“QuotaPath has been critical to help figure out how I’m tracking against not just my own personal goals and quota attainment, but also understanding how I’m contributing and bringing success to the organization.” –Jacquie B.

Deliver results and celebrate together

High fives are sadly no longer possible these days, so how do we make sure we’re celebrating success together? Sales commissions are too often ‘reported’ to reps after the period is over. This usually takes the form of a spreadsheet or even worse, a screenshot of a row in a spreadsheet sent from finance or ops. This process completely takes away the ‘winning’ aspect of getting paid your commission, especially in a remote environment. Sales leaders should know exactly when their reps are winning and celebrate together. If it makes sense, get virtual assistants for them to ease their work and accomplish more tasks.

Use the platform to easily set personal or business goals, track them in real-time, and virtually high-five each other when you complete them. In addition to goal setting, here are a few more ceremonies we’ve rolled out to make sure we maintain a celebratory and connected atmosphere:

• A dedicated #shoutouts channel on Slack: Is one of your colleagues doing an incredible job? Throw it on #shoutouts.
• End of week check-in highlighting WoWs or ‘Wins of the Week’: Give your managers, leaders, or the whole team a chance to talk about the wins that are happening around them.
• Byte & Bites: Bring your entire company together (virtually) to share a meal and learn something about a topic they don’t usually get a chance to be a part of.

QuotaPath’s mission is centered around creating a single source of truth, aligning teams, and motivating reps. We can supercharge your sales commission process and ensure that a distributed team does not create a disconnected culture. It’s free and easy to try out for your team.

It’s no secret that cash is king, especially when trying to motivate sales reps to close more business or SDRs to set more meetings. But after a while, cash loses its excitement and sales reps can get bored. In my experience, it’s good to switch it up every once in awhile, so here are some of the non-cash incentives that have worked for me in the past.

Lunch with execs

For an up and coming sales rep (especially one with management potential), face time with an exec can progress their career AND increase alignment. This also helps the VP of Sales or CEO get a better understanding of what’s going on at the ground level. When I was early in my career in sales at a Fortune 500 company, I was selected to sit at a table with the CEO during our annual sales kick-off and it’s left an impression on me to this day.

Conference tickets

There are some amazing sales conferences like TOPO Summit, AA-ISP, and Tenbound. Getting to travel for a conference, network with amazing sales leaders and learn new best practices is another win-win for your rep and the company. Send your top 3 reps to a conference and give them a budget for a couple of nice dinners, book a nice hotel for them, or fly them out, first class. When they get back, have them present their learnings to the team.

Days off

In a high-stress environment like sales, oftentimes salespeople forget to take time off or they have limited PTO. Offering a long weekend, a random day off, or even a half-day can go a long way. About once per month, I’d tell my SDRs that if they set three meetings by noon on Friday they could leave early. Oftentimes that was the most productive day of the week! Just make sure it’s not announced beforehand or you risk sandbagging.

Gift cards

This one is kind of cheating because (at least for me and a lot of other millennials) Amazon gift cards are as good as cash. I’d recommend giving gift cards for a place that the reps might not normally splurge on for themselves like a fancy restaurant or a local luxury hotel.

Concert tickets

Being in Austin, we have a lot of concert options… but trying to buy tickets that would appeal to everyone isn’t an easy task (unless Beyonce happens to be coming to your town). I once ran a monthlong competition for VIP tickets to the big music festival in Austin (Austin City Limits), and because there were dozens of musicians there was something for everyone. It turned out to be one of my most popular contests.

Quota relief

This one is controversial because it can hurt your overall sales, but during a couple of slow months I told my reps that for every 2 dollars they sold over their quota, their quota was reduced by that month the following month. We turned what could have been a slow month into a great month. Here’s the best part, because they were trying so hard to build pipeline, they ended up overperforming the following month too!

I always love hearing exciting new competitions and sales incentives, so if you have any that I should use in the future, shoot me an email at graham@quotapath.com

I’ve written about when (and how) to change sales compensation plans under the best circumstances. However, sales is an imperfect industry! Sometimes you need to make on the fly changes to your compensation plans. Here are some instances where it’s worth reconsidering your current compensation plan:

Economic downturn

There have been a few economic downturns in the past couple of decades, including the COVID-19 pandemic. Each time, we’ve seen spikes in unemployment, decreases in sales, and tightened budgets. All of these factors contribute to missed quotas. There are several changes you make to compensation plans during tough economic times, but the simplest is decreasing quota. If your sales team isn’t going to hit their quotas, then you run the risk of losing your sales team during an already tough time to hire. It might hurt your sales in the short term but will help your team in the long run.

A drastic change in the market

Have you ever had a competitor go out of business? I have and it’s a weird experience. All of a sudden your pipeline deals where you were competing against them seem like sure things. You can go through your CRM and find all the times you were told, “We use XYZ Company” and call them with a special offer.

There are a lot of different circumstances that change your entire industry. A new competitor hits the scene and starts taking away all of your business. A new law is enacted requiring public companies to use a tool like yours. A major data provider changes their terms of service. If you change your compensation plan every time one of these things happened, you’d be swapping it out every couple of months. However, if it has a material impact on your sales (positively or negatively) you might consider a change.

Company acquisition

I’ve been a part of several acquisitions. One of the largest mistakes that I see is when an organization doesn’t try to quickly align the newly merged sales team’s compensation plans. If one plan has been working very well for one of the companies, it could be worth changing everyone to that plan. The worst thing you can do is not even think about it and try to keep it ‘business as usual’.

New leadership

The average tenure of a VP of Sales has continued to drop year over year. In 2017, it was down to 19 months. That means that every year and a half your company is likely to bring in a new sales leader. With new sales leaders come new sales methodology and new compensation plans. While it’s not advisable to immediately come into a new org and make sweeping changes, each sales leader has their own preferred compensation plan style.

Product changes

Here’s an example where you might consider increasing sales quotas. If your team recently debuted a new product that improves your average contract value, grows your total addressable market, or increases your close rate, you can look at either changing overall quota or creating a product-specific quota or commission rate.

Employee turnover

I can speak directly to this one. I once rolled out a new plan to my SDRs in 2017 that was so bad I lost about half the team because their earnings fell from $75k/year to about $50k/year. I realized it about 2 months into the new plan but dragged my heels and waited another 4 months before making a change. It took my team another year to totally recover. If I had acted a little more quickly in changing back to the old plan or rolling out an entirely different plan the damage would have been mitigated.

With all that said, the ‘how’ remains the same from my previous post. Here’s the quick version:

1. Understand the plan yourself
2. Roll it out to everyone all at once
3. Explain the why
4. Practice explaining it
5. Prepare for questions
6. Give your reps a way to track their attainment and commission

For whatever reason you make changes to your sales compensation plan, it’s always important for your reps to entirely understand their plan and how much they’re making in real-time. QuotaPath helps your team get a full understanding of their earnings and the details of their quotas and is free to use.

During these unprecedented times, organizational sales leaders everywhere are asking, “How should I change my compensation plan if my company is impacted by COVID-19?” This pandemic has uniquely affected all companies and industries and for some, sales numbers have (and may continue to) slow down. For others, companies are faced with the hard decision of laying off or furloughing parts of their organization. No matter what, leaders are having to quickly adapt their sales strategies and a big part of that is sales compensation plans. It’s important to keep your employees happy during this time, and one surefire way to do that is to make sure they are getting paid.

There are a lot of different “levers” you can pull within a compensation plan to make it more rep-friendly during uncertain economic times. Below are the 5 that I have recommended to different organizations. Note: I don’t recommend using all 5 of these tactics simultaneously, it’s important to hold some additional tools in case of a prolonged downturn.

Lower quotas

I’m leading out with the big one here: lowering quotas. While this is generally frowned upon, unprecedented times call for moves that are bold. If your reps aren’t going to hit their quotas, holding them to it is nothing but demotivating. Some organizations are simply removing quotas for the time being instead of lowering them and having to go through the pain of raising them again in a few months. It’s important to act swiftly yet deliberately while considering longer-term implications. Finding the right balance can be a challenge. Need help figuring out what your new quota should be? Let’s chat, here’s my calendar: https://calendly.com/grahamcollins/30min.

Remove decelerated commission and commission cliffs

If you have a sales compensation plan that includes a “decelerator”, for example, if a rep earns less than 50% of their on-target earnings for hitting 50% of their quota, now might be the time to remove that component. Nothing is more demotivating than doing all you can to sell deals and earning less than you would normally on the same deals. The same goes for commission “cliffs,” when a rep doesn’t earn any commission until they hit a certain quota attainment percentage.

Add in additional incentives

Cash can be tight in an economic downturn, which means when people exceed their quota, it should be celebrated! If you don’t have an accelerator for overperformance, now might be the time to introduce one. Or if you do have an accelerator, maybe you want to double it for the next 3 months. Travel is currently impossible (and unsafe!) but when the world gets back to normal, your reps might want a vacation; now could be a good time to run a competition with a (post-pandemic) vacation as the prize. Also, most salespeople are working from home so you can use perks like standing desks, noise-canceling headphones, and nice monitors as a motivator.

Compensate on something other than revenue

While budgets are frozen, now might be the time to compensate your reps on something that benefits them long term. You could take a page out of the SDR playbook and reward your reps for setting meetings, building pipeline, or other top-of-funnel activities like calls/emails. While new spending might be frozen, existing contracts might be freed up, so you could employ your sales team to work on upsells and renewals on your current customer base. You can even get creative and have your sales team send emails surrounding a fundraiser or have them spend their time making masks for local hospitals.

Remove Performance Improvement Plans

If someone is fearing for their job, in addition to everything else that’s going on, they might become too stressed to do their job successfully. A way to prevent this is to temporarily suspend Performance Improvement Plans (PIPs) for anyone currently on one and declare that you won’t be issuing any until a specific date (subject to change). While you still want people doing their jobs, adding the risk of them losing their income during an already uncertain time will hurt morale for years to come. Instead, investigate additional health and wellness initiatives to make sure your reps feel physically and emotionally fit during these turbulent times. Try online yoga, guided meditation, additional 1-on-1s, virtual team happy hours, etc.

While each of these techniques might provide temporary support, remember that you need to be very careful about how you message changes to your sales team. If you haven’t seen a downturn in sales or new meetings, don’t lower quota proactively! It’s more likely to cause panic and be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Use QuotaPath to keep a very close eye on your team’s performance and earnings to ensure you’re aware of how changes might impact them — entirely for free.

We picked a helluva month to release our premium functionality. April 2020 has been circled on my calendar for months.

We’ve raised sufficient funds to be a product-led company and have spent two years building software that takes unnecessary complexity out of sales comp plans. We’ve had phenomenal success with individuals adopting the software and giving us feedback about what their real pain points are in understanding commissions.

We took all of the feedback and built a best-in-class software that will be released early next month.

Like all of you, the coronavirus was not in our initial plans. My first and foremost obligation was making sure my team felt safe and secure. I spent all of last week with them to ensure we understood our “new world.”

Next order of business is the future of the company. Our product is now ready for prime time and we are doubling down on our “Product Led Growth” strategy. We want to help companies eliminate a fiscal line item and that’s why we are offering our premium functionality free for the next three months.

Budgets are tightening. Business leaders are forced to examine every line item. With so much to worry about right now, sales compensation shouldn’t be one of your top issues.

QuotaPath wants to be part of the solution. We will also help evaluate your new goals, quotas, and comp plans. We have seen thousands of plans over the last couple of years and know what to look for in a good plan. Let us help you build it and not have a delay in rolling them out.

With that said, our app and doors are open for business. Get in touch to alleviate at least this one headache.

-AJ Bruno, CEO & Co-Founder

You walk in for your final round sales interview. The recruiter told you to dress ‘smart casual’ so you ditched the stuffy corporate outfit but you don’t quite hit Zuckerberg chic… you want them to take you seriously after all. You show up 15 minutes early, resume and notepad in hand. As you’re getting a tour of the sales floor, you’re… a bit blown away. You knew it was a startup, but there is techno music playing, people shotgunning Red Bull, ping pong balls flying through the air, and a heated foosball match has drawn a decent crowd. Everyone is smiling, laughing, and generally enjoying their lives.

You finally sit down with the sales manager and she asks you “why do you want to work here?” Your mind does a quick flashback to the sales floor and you start to say “the culture!”

But wait! Before you say that, you remember this (apparently self-referential) blog post and know not to confuse environment with culture.

What is ‘Environment’?

Environment is the space a company occupies. In this instance, what the sales floor looks like, what kind of perks there are, the office location, the noise level, the desks, the ping pong table, the Red Bull. I’m not trying to tell you that these things don’t matter. I’ve worked on a floor like the one I described above and, conversely, what felt like a combination morgue/library. I can tell you that if you’re surrounded by joy and excitement, you’re going to want to come to work every day. For me, having an environment that I love is a pre-requisite for me to consider working somewhere. However, it’s not the only factor. There are plenty of companies out there with amazing environments but atrocious cultures. So what’s culture? Funny you ask.

What is ‘Culture’?

Culture is the identity, personality, and customs of your company and sales team. What you might not have seen on your tour is that the foosball game is between two top SDRs celebrating a record-setting day. The techno music was put on to get everyone amped for the daily cold calling hour. Different cultures are appealing to different people, but a few things that really excite me about working for a company are:

1. Learning is encouraged. Everyone isn’t just open to new ideas/tools/points of view, they actively seek them out. If your idea fails? That’s awesome too! You learned something.




2. Opportunity for growth. Besides selling shoes in high school, I’ve never done the same role for more than 18 months. I want to move up, I want to move around, I want to keep learning. A company that fosters this is a company I’m interested in.




3. Everyone is winning. I’ve worked with some incredibly high performing teams. They weren’t high performing purely because of luck or because of raw talent. Sure there was a bit of both, but they were high performing because everyone wanted to be successful and worked their tails off to get there. If you’re surrounded by people who want to win, you will want to win.

So what do you say to the “why do you want to work here?” question? How about something like “Well, the environment here is clearly great. People seem to enjoy coming to work every single day. While that is a great benefit — no one wants to dread coming into the office every day — what really attracts me to this role is that there is a culture of learning, growth, and success.”

Great work, you got the job.

You’ve had a solid quarter. You hit your sales quota, signed big-name clients, and consistently closed deals.

Then you see your sales commission check and it’s inaccurate. Very, very inaccurate.

Wait… what?

Where is all the money you earned? You go on a wild goose chase for answers. Who’s in charge of compensation anyway? Sales ops? Your Sales Director? Someone in the C-suite? Are you really prepared to complain about your pay to a senior member of the company?

Maybe the mistake is yours. You’ve been tracking your sales commissions in a spreadsheet, but you’re no Excel whiz. You’re a closer. Did you botch one of the equations? Come to think of it, management tracks sales commissions with spreadsheets too. Did they make an unfortunate typo or forget to add your latest deal?

For salespeople, these situations are far too common. Inaccurate paychecks are unfair, demotivating, and create unneeded tension. Finding answers is difficult, and can drive talented salespeople to look for new jobs. In fact, pay is the No. 1 reason people quit their jobs.

Here are seven common reasons why sales commissions are inaccurate.

Spreadsheets are riddled with errors

Many companies rely on spreadsheets to calculate sales commissions. But spreadsheets are notoriously unreliable. One study found that 88% of spreadsheets contain discrepancies. The culprit? Manual data entry. The error-prone process results in inaccuracies that lead to major consequences. Back in 2012, a typo by a London Olympics staffer led to the erroneous sale of 10,000 extra event tickets that had to be refunded or exchanged. Harvard economics professors suffered a spreadsheet error that reversed key results of an academic study. JP Morgan arguably had the worst spreadsheet mishap — once losing $6 billion due to a copy/paste error. If those institutions are susceptible to errors, so is your organization.

Sales commission plans are a low priority

CEOs identify talent retention and attraction as priority for 2020. But many executives don’t focus on compensation plans as a major motivator. Managers may even argue that salespeople should close deals for the good of the company, not to earn commissions! Managers and executives are focused on the next pay period, not the previous one — and if there’s a discrepancy, don’t expect a quick solution.

Determining who’s in charge of comp isn’t easy

When there’s a problem with your compensation, it’s difficult to get answers. Who owns the sales commission process? In a smaller company, that responsibility might fall on top executives. In a larger organization, operations, sales managers, or even finance could be in charge. Finding answers can be time-consuming and takes you away from what you do best — selling.

Fragmentation

Sales compensation plans can vary widely from department to department — or even salesperson to salesperson. In some organizations, every salesperson has an entirely different comp plan! Even if the basic format of the plan is the same, exact commission rates might not be identical. Such fragmentation leads to confusion and frustration.

Comp plans are delayed

It’s already March and plenty of companies have not yet released sales comp plans. With no metrics to shoot for, salespeople are unsure how to achieve bonuses and earn more pay. That creates friction and impedes motivation. If you don’t know your quota, how can you shoot to exceed it?

Comp plans change

The only constant in comp plans is that they change. If you’re lucky, your plan only changes once a year, but if people are consistently demolishing quotas, expect management to increase quotas to match attainment. When there is change in management — say a sales director leaves the company — their replacement is left with a legacy comp plan and is likely to make changes. Sometimes these changes are warranted; other times they feel unfair — like someone moving the goalposts further away while you’re still playing the game.

Comp plans are treated like a chore

In many organizations, comp plans — and commission calculation — are viewed as a burden for management. That’s a mistake. Instead, they should be treated as a strategic lever to motivate and retain top talent.

Lack of transparency

Managers typically track commissions on a spreadsheet that’s inaccessible to staff. It’s nearly impossible for salespeople to find errors. That lack of transparency leads to uncertainty and demotivates salespeople striving hard to reach goals.

QuotaPath helps companies solve the inaccuracy problem by calculating and automating commissions in a quick, easy way. Automated data makes the QuotaPath process far more accurate than manual data entry. Transparent calculations build trust between executives and salespeople. Easy-to-understand statistics and dashboards keep salespeople motivated to hit goals and excited to have clarity around pay. If you haven’t checked us out, it’s free to sign up and start tracking your commissions today.

It’s that time of year again! In a couple of weeks, your office is likely to be a flurry of college basketball, brackets, Cinderella stories, and buzzer-beaters. While this can serve as a huge distraction late in the quarter, I have a great way to keep the energy high while motivating your SDRs to some last-minute wins.

March SDR Brackets

I ran this competition every year that I managed an SDR team and it’s a lot of fun, while also being a good way to keep up the momentum during a traditionally slow time.

Set the rules

It seems straightforward, but make sure all the rules are clearly laid out and strictly adhered to. I always had a very easy to understand set of rules: whoever sets the most outbound demos over a 2 day period wins and moves on in the bracket. We resisted complicating it with stipulations about the demo having to occur, awarding points for effort, etc. because we wanted people focused on the task at hand. Take whatever the core goal of your SDR team is, and base it on that: meetings, demos, cold calls, discovery calls, etc.

Build a bracket

In a perfect world, the number of SDRs on your team would be divisible by 4 when making a bracket, but (at least in my experience) that never happens. How do you make a bracket when you have 19 SDRs? Good news, there are a bunch of websites that can do this for you: here’s my favorite one.

Seed your SDRs

You can either randomly assign the seed numbers or you can base it on previous performance. I’ve done both and I think I prefer randomly assigning seed numbers. If you have your best SDR competing against a chronic underperformer, it causes demotivation and possible sandbagging. However, if you want to reward a top performer with a first-round bye (for you non-sports people that means you don’t have to compete during the first round of the competition), you can seed based on performance.

Hype it up

You can see a photo above of the bracket that we made for this competition in 2017. If you can’t tell, it’s BIG. And it hung on the wall in the sales pit. Everyone knew it was going on, even all the sales reps. I was in a bit of a cost-cutting mode during this particular year, so as you can see top prize was $150 with a prize for 2nd and 3rd place. I encourage you to put a good amount of prize money (or rewards like headphones, flights, days off, etc.) toward this competition. I could even see doing something like $25 for each round you win so everyone feels like they have a shot at some cash.

If you can get your team to buy in on this competition, it can build a great pipeline for the beginning of Q2. I encourage you to try it and really get into it. Buy a whistle and ref uniform! Send out regular updates to the entire company! Oh, and if you need a way to track your team’s attainment — not just in March — you can check out QuotaPath. With our Teams functionality, you can increase transparency when it comes to commission and quota attainment for everyone on your team.

Good sales training programs can be a highly effective way to improve the performance of your sales teams. In fact, a study done by CSOInsights, the research division of Miller Heiman Group, discusses how top-rated programs have been shown to increase win rates by 10%. This can be a drastic increase in sales productivity for many organizations. With that in mind, we have compiled a list of 6 top-rated sales programs that just might be what your organization is looking for.

Note: QuotaPath is not affiliated with any of the sales training programs in this article.

Driving to Close: John Barrows Training

The John Barrows Sales Training Program is a great one for new sales hires in B2B companies. It focuses on two main topics: filling the funnel and driving to close. ‘Filling the Funnel’ is a program that tries to optimize your team by focusing on improving the quality of meetings with decision-makers by utilizing methods such as process, techniques, and structure. ‘Driving to Close’ is a program that tries to improve the quality of the interactions that your reps have. This includes learning ways to handle various scenarios such as negotiating a deal or objection handling.

Cost: $495 for individuals

We reached out to Victoria Weber, Client Development Manager at Methodify, to get an idea of her experience going through the JBarrows Sales Training program. Here’s what she said about it.

“Going through JBarrows Sales Training early on in my career completely reframed my mindset around client interactions and became a lasting part of my consultative sales approach. Having a repeatable methodology supports a great customer experience and helps me avoid common pitfalls like listening with “happy ears”.

5 key takeaways:

1. Set an upfront contract at the beginning of each meeting to ensure that expectations are agreed upon by all parties.
2. Decide the next steps before ending a call and send a summary email as soon as possible to establish accountability.
3. Confirm communication frequency and channels to avoid becoming a nuisance.
4. Yes is the best and no is the second-best answer in sales. If a prospect is comfortable saying no, you can avoid wasting time chasing down a “maybe” or dark prospect.
5. Do not “check-in” or “touch base” with potential customers. If you want to be viewed as a valued partner, have a reason for reaching out and be intentional with communications.

The sales profession is ever-evolving, so I still keep my finger on the pulse with posts from John Barrows on LinkedIn, YouTube, and podcasts, as well as content from his colleague, Morgan J. Ingram. They empower all reps to #keepdialing and #makeithappen!”

Sandler Training

Here is another sales training program geared towards B2B sales. Sandler Training is one of the more established, award-winning programs on this list. They teach salespeople how to avoid improving their sales efficiency by taking control of the customer conversation to drive results. Sandler also has programs to improve collaboration and communication through leadership strategies.

Cost: Varies

Hoffman Training

Hoffman Training is a one-day workshop training program that is useful for both sales reps and sales managers. Their workshops typically cover a variety of topics useful for new sales hires and even more experienced sales reps. They can cover everything from building a sales pipeline to teaching your reps techniques to increase response rates and optimize sales calls.

Cost: $595 per workshop

Richardson Trianing Program

One of the best aspects of the Richardson Sales Training Program is the ability to customize for the needs of the individual or organization. They focus on creating engagement with the participants to improve learning. Participants receive coaching and feedback throughout the training. This program is great because participants are able to apply the lessons they learn immediately during the training.

Cost: Varies

Dale Carnegie Training

The Dale Carnegie Sales Training Program promises to help sales reps with improving relationships with leads, identifying unmet needs for prospects, improving lead conversion rates, and creating customer loyalty. It’s grounded in fundamental lessons learned from Dale Carnegie’s influential book “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” For some other interesting reads, check out our blog post about our favorite sales books.

Cost: $249 virtual and varies for in-person training

Winning by Design

Winning by Design is another popular sales program that thinks about sales and customer success as more of a science. They have a 3 step approach to training your sales hires. Step 1 is assessing the revenue engine of your company and how your sales process works. Step 2 is designing your sales playbook using a data-driven approach. Finally in Step 3, they give you actual coaching on ways to improve your process.

Cost: Varies

Sales training programs are a great method of professional development for sales teams. At QuotaPath, professional development is one of the core principles of our employee experience. To make sure our team is always learning, employees get a yearly allowance for any learning and development programs or conferences they are interested in. Another way we are dedicated to building high-performing teams is by creating a tool that empowers sales teams. Sign up and easily get your team set up on QuotaPath.

Sunday, March 8th marks International Women’s Day. The UN’s webpage for the day describes it as, “…a time to reflect on progress made, to call for change and to celebrate acts of courage and determination by ordinary women, who have played an extraordinary role in the history of their countries and communities.” That sounds empowering!

The women in the Philly QuotaPath office decided to get together for lunch and have a casual chat about our experiences, accomplishments, and struggles, both large scale and daily. But when asked the question, “What does this day mean to you?” no one could really answer. It was a bit of a cricket situation before we all disclosed that none of us knew the origin of the holiday that’s celebrating everyone in the room.

In some countries, it’s just another day on the calendar yet others celebrate it more seriously, some even declare it a public holiday. Melanie Taube, Head of Creative Marketing, lived in Russia for a period of time and shared a lovely story about how much her father did on this day for the women in his life — delivering beautiful flowers to his daughter, wife, and colleagues. For others, the only parallel was the Women’s March in 2017, just one day after the presidential inauguration, where women across the globe came together and marched in protest.

It was neat because we all had so many shared experiences. What particularly rang true was how we all felt supported by QuotaPath. Marguerite Hamilton, Software Engineer, got emotional talking about much it meant to her and her new family for the time QuotaPath offered for maternity leave, and how much she appreciated the considerations as a new mother returning back to the office. Several of us in the room, in our own form and fashion, said that we felt comfortable bringing up issues with our CEO, AJ Bruno, and other members of the leadership team and that we trusted that things would be addressed and followed through. This made me feel proud to work for an organization that cares so much about all of us, collectively and individually.

We talked about a few of our greatest accomplishments and a powerful theme here was not to be afraid to carve your own path and ask for what you want (promotions, title change, more responsibility, salary increases). Alongside this topic of accomplishments, Mariclare Hall, Director of Product, told us about a black trans panel at the William Way LGBTQ Community Center she recently attended. When a member of the panel was asked about their greatest accomplishment they answered with, “Being alive.” It was a great reminder that we should all be aware of our privilege.

But the truth is, it’s still challenging being women (and any/all marginalized group) working in a male-dominated industry, such as the tech industry. Many of us felt that throughout our careers, we’ve had to work harder to be respected, trusted and listened to. Zoe Wolfe, Software Engineer, said that on her first day of Computer Programming class the professor asked her if she was sure she was in the right place – she was the only female student in the 20 person class. She’s also one of the brightest and most driven college students I know.

While there’s still great progress to be made for gender equality and equity, it felt nice taking a step away from our busy calendars to share lunch and conversation with a room of powerful, intelligent, and thoughtful women. (I would even say it even felt cathartic!) We questioned why we hadn’t done this before and made a plan to have more intentional gatherings with each other. With that, we at QuotaPath wish a happy International Women’s Day to all the badass women out there who are putting in the work, building businesses, driving change and innovation, mentoring others, balancing work and families, and all the million and one other things you’re all doing to stay happy and healthy!

If you’re using Salesforce® as your CRM, you know that they provide have some standard ‘opportunity stages’ out of the box. However, most sales organizations customize these stages based on their business needs.

This is one of those problems that end up having a much more complicated answer than one would hope for. You have to balance the need for good, actionable data with the desire to keep it simple. If people can understand rules, they can abide by rules. Sure, you could hire a Salesforce consultant to help out with setting this up, but that can be expensive. Instead, focus on what is important for your Salesforce instance and your sales team.

When setting your Salesforce opportunity stages, keep these rules in mind

1. Make it easy to understand
2. Make it very clear what each stage means
3. Automate as much as you can

These are the Salesforce opportunity stages I recommend

Demo Scheduled

If we’re thinking top of the funnel, I believe that an opportunity should be created whenever a meeting is booked. The stage for this should be something like “Demo Scheduled” or “Meeting Set” or something. This allows you to see how effective your team is at scheduling meetings. If a demo ends up being cancelled or the contact no-shows, you should move this Salesforce opportunity to Closed/Lost. The temptation is to delete it, but it’s important to keep the data for your analysis later on.

Demo Occurred

Next, we should have a stage that indicates the demo/meeting happened. We’ve used “Demo Occurred” at my past organizations. This stage should be automated. For example, as soon as a ‘Demo’ activity is logged on the opportunity, Salesforce moves it to this stage. An opportunity can certainly skip this stage and move further down the pipeline. It is important that Salesforce recognizes that the opportunity hit this stage at some point. This allows you to track sales opportunity flow through the funnel.

Qualified, etc.

Next, we have any number of intermediate steps on the funnel. This could be as simple as 1 (‘Qualified’) or could have 10 steps along the way (‘Trial’, ’Qualified’, ‘Negotiating’, ‘Verbal’, ‘Contract Sent’, etc.). It really depends on how intense you want to get with the segmenting of your pipeline. At a minimum, I would recommend 2 additional steps in here (‘Qualified’ and ‘Verbal’). That way you have a few intermediate steps between demo and close. Make sure you set clear guidelines around what each of these stages mean (more below).

If you’ve made it this far, you need to know the most important thing about setting stages. Ensure that you set very clear, unambiguous guidelines around what each of these stages mean. E.g. ‘Qualified’ means: 1) that you’re talking with a Director level+. 2) They confirmed that they are looking to buy a solution. 3) You have a follow-up call scheduled within the next 2 weeks. These will depend on the organization itself, so I can’t give you firm guidelines around this, but don’t waffle on these.

Closed/Won & Closed/Lost

Finally, we have a Closed/Won and Closed/Lost stage. These are fairly self-explanatory. Closed/Won if the client signs a contract (or your equivalent). Closed/Lost if you no longer have a chance to win this deal. Again, make sure that Closed/Lost has a very clear definition.

Automation is the way forward

Now that you have the stages set up, you should put as much automation into the funnel as possible. For example, once you log a Demo activity on an opportunity, it should automatically move the stage from ‘Demo Scheduled’ to ‘Demo Held’ stage. Once you send a contract, it should automatically move from whatever stage it’s in to ‘Contract Sent’ stage, etc.

Salespeople generally do not like CRMs. They would rather spend time closing deals than updating stages in their CRM. Make it easy for them, automate it for them, and explain WHY they should update their stages.

A clean CRM is a good CRM. The first step to a clean CRM is to ensure that everything is well-defined and laid out clearly for everyone. I can’t promise that you’ll have a pristine CRM if you follow my advice, but it’s certainly a good start. Plus, with QuotaPath’s Salesforce integration, if you have well laid out stages, you can easily automate your commission calculating for everyone in the organization!