Articles and Plans

The U.S. Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley act in 2002, in response to multiple accounting scandals and collapses of major companies such as Worldcom, Enron and Arthur Anderson. The primary goal of this act is to protect investors by improving the accuracy and reliability of corporate financial information. It has done this by specifying new standards of accountability, needed controls, disclosure requirements and it is enforcing it by new penalties for acts of wrongdoing and non-compliance.

Sales commission programs are possibly the most variable programs conducted by a firm. These programs tend to vary significantly from industry to industry, and many times within companies in an industry. Sales commission programs tend to be different by employees even within a single firm.

You have to maintain one spreadsheet per sales rep and pretty soon you have a nightmare of tens or hundreds of individual spreadsheets that you have maintain by hand.

Sales Commission can be a flashpoint in disputes between Mortgage Brokerages and their agents. Litigation related to these disputes can result in monetary losses and in some cases the distraction of the lawsuit can drive brokerages to collapse.

Single Sign is a method of access control that enables a user to authenticate once and gain access to the resources of multiple software applications.
Users have only one identity (User Ids and Passwords) to maintain. When the users are authenticated at the OS level (example windows) they need not be authenticated again to use QCommission.

Salespeople are a company's ambassadors to the world. They actively promote the company and its products and services. They are the front line between the company and its customers, and are typically the driving force of revenues - top-line company growth.

Vroom's theory assumes that behavior results from conscious choices among alternatives whose purpose it is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. The key elements to this theory are referred to as Expectancy (E), Instrumentality (I), and Valence (V). Critical to the understanding of the theory is the understanding that each of these factors represents a belief.

At a recent business meeting I was seated next to the president of a local business sharing information about our respective companies. My tablemate explained that his firm had no need for the services of a sales incentive plan consultant, as he had not changed his sales compensation plan for ten years.

How do companies align sales execution with their overall strategy and objectives? Although much can be achieved by investment in marketing and in sectors such as the food industry by the relationships with, and incentives given, to the retailers, there is also a dependence on the sales teams. It is their incentives and commssion plans that drive behavior and ultimately the success or failure of achieving the expected types and       levels of revenues and profit margins.

 

Compensation can be one of the hardest things to tune and get right in a Sales organization. I've seen a wide variety of compensation schemes through my career, and have sat on a compensation committee in a larger company that I worked for (where we did a very comprehensive survey of the way things were done else where in the industry). There are far too many variants to even being to elaborate on them all here, but I will try to touch on a few key things from my perspective.

For every salesperson, there's a perfect product and a perfect commission structure. Finding both leads to sales success. Common structures for sales commissions include being paid a high salary with low commission or being paid based on individual sales, territory volume, a share of the profits, bringing in new business, maintaining old business, wholesale or net (retail) sales, hitting an exact target or hitting variable targets.

Some companies may actually succeed in maintaining an existing customer for a year or so after declaring it a "house account," but eventually the competitor makes an inroad. After all, how did you get that customer in the first place? Certainly not by telephoning the purchasing department once a month and making two trips a year to buy them lunch.

What I'm going to share with you today is the single most powerful trick I know for supercharging your bottom line. At some point in time, if you are going to grow your construction business beyond $2 million, you are going to need someone working on sales full time. Now, maybe sales is your thing and you want to do that full time. Fantastic.

Today's changing compensation landscape provides opportunities to improve pay designs, specifically in sales management compensation. The good news for sales executives and managers is that, unlike CEOs, their pay designs inherently have the potential for more flexibility, creating a "win-win" for both plan participants and shareholders. Here's why: Sales management has a more direct line of sight to sales and profits than top management. This allows for commission pay designs with more volatility than discretionary, nonsales management cash bonuses.

 

"Big territories can't grow." "There aren't enough sales opportunities left." "Marketing doesn't understand customer-level realities." Left unaddressed, uninformed perceptions can drive dissatisfaction with the sales incentive plan and, in extreme cases, the job. Sales and HR leaders must communicate the realities and provide clarity around the decision-making process to quell those distorted perceptions.

Does your CFO understand your objectives with sales compensation plans? Do you understand the finance department's mandates for your plan design? This article, from workspan magazine, is a refreshing look at the sometimes challenging relationship between finance and HR, and we know sales comp professionals can relate.

Like many of you, my fourth quarter included a lot of sales compensation design, review and revision. Given the business environment and the forecasting difficulties that many organizations are facing, some are still working - even now - to get sales incentive plans nailed down in final form. With this in mind, I thought it might be helpful to dedicate a post to the basics of sales commission calculation.

House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Health Chair Pete Stark (D-Calif.) on Thursday in a letter to CMS acting administrator Kerry Weems called for a limit on new sales commissions in an attempt to dissuade sales agents from pressuring Medicare beneficiaries to frequently switch Medicare Advantage plans, CQ HealthBeat reports.

In the sales industry, one of the most heated topics of discussion is commission sales vs. salary sales. There are benefits to using both, but many people are hard-core advocates of one or the other. Some people believe commission is the only method of payment for true salespeople, while others would like to see a balance between the two.

As most companies know, sales are the force behind the growth of a company. If the company has a product or service, then sales is the key to revenue and the sales force is the key to making that revenue. Over the last several months, the economic landscape has changed significantly, and companies are looking for ways to increase sales effectiveness and maximize profits.

Effective sales compensation is critical to the success of any go-to-market strategy. Yet designing and managing a program is rarely easy. Determining how people are paid is a sensitive matter that can become increasingly complicated when reconciling the disparate needs of key stakeholders in sales, finance, human resources, and marketing. To better manage this complexity and to keep the discussions constructive, consider the following four cornerstones of effective sales compensation.

When sales and finance executives at Comcast-Spectacor realized they were missing potential sales because managers were unable to spot key cross-market opportunities, they knew it was time to move to a sales performance management software application, said Mark DiMaurizio, the company's vice president of technology solutions.

On paper, the theory behind sales incentive alignment seems pretty straightforward. Identify a key business goal, such as new product sales, profitability, account penetration, or reducing inventory, and then develop the right programs to drive results.

Sales compensation for employees is commonly a part of payroll from a business perspective. It is affected by many of the laws and regulations such as taxation for the company. But compliance to minimum wage law and overtime law has been a grey area. Many nations require a minimum salary per worker. For wage rates, the US government calls this the “Minimum Wage”. In other countries it may be called a “Living Wage” or something similar. The law requires businesses to pay employees at least this much money in order to be compliant with the law. Minimum wage is typically based on hours worked.

1. Login. In the Desktop version of QCommission, one has to login to the remote Desktop to access the application. But in the Web version, it can be accessed from the browser of your local computer that has internet connection.
2. Reps Access. In the Desktop version (QCommission Premier), there is an option of Portal access for the reps. In the Web version (QCommission Premier), we can provide credentials to the reps to login so they can see their statements instead of the administrators sending the statements thru email. In some industries, there are requirements where they want the reps to enter their sales data. This is possible in the Web version.