Nearly 40% of All Sales Professionals Are Being Assigned More Duties With No Increase In Pay
Hello, people. Welcome to the BBC Youtube channel. Despite challenges in the aftermath of the pandemic and resulting Great Resignation, sellers remain undeterred. Roughly one third still struggle to close deals and meet quotas according to a study by CRM analyst firm Beagle Research Group and Oracle.
This insight comes from 512 American sales professionals and shows how changes in the industry are difficult, sometimes due to a lack of technology that supports modern sales processes. If you want more of this content, BBC Member, subscribe to the BBC Youtube channel and hit the notification bell.
The pandemic and Great Resignation have altered who sellers interact with and how
With much information to note, sellers must be prepared to bring in data and make sure buyers are up-to-date with product history and deals progression. The more you know regarding your customers’ needs during the buying process, the easier it is to sell them products they will be happy with
Most, but not all, of the sellers did not make the switch to a new job during this pandemic. One-fifth of sellers say that customer contacts change often.
Customers are slower to make decisions, which is reducing sales. 43 percent of sellers believe that customer purchases are decreasing due to this speed-back trend.
Seemingly, the customer is getting more active in the buying process toward the end of the purchase—but they still want sellers to meet their needs. 36 percent of buyers today say that a wider range of products are available to them on their own research (compared to 40 percent from just two years ago) and buyers are more willing to shop for best deals on products these days.
Sellers struggle to close deals due to a lack of resources and distraction
To avoid having poorer than expected sales, one-third of sellers have difficulty in various aspects of their work, which impacts their chances to make quota. The important link between a seller’s success or failure and other factors is the amount of time that each task requires.
37 percent of sellers say that their sales organizations have created higher workloads, while they’re not receiving any more resources or salaries.
59 percent of sellers are engaged in training and onboarding new sellers.
The group of responders shows that 52% report a training time of four-to-five hours per week, and 26% reporting over five hours
29% of sellers say that if a co-worker leaves, they use digital notes outside of CRM to transfer learnings.
More automation is encouraged to help offload routine tasks
Existing vendors are happy to offload boring, manual tasks like managing and archiving data if it helps them sell more. Continuing with the trend of automating services, sellers would be happy to get rid of tasks which require human input, like CRM systems.
39 percent of sellers said they spend too much time working in different technologies.
While 16 percent of sellers describe their sales processes as the Wild, Wild West — with intuition being used instead of data or best practices — use cloud-based tools to get better results.
AI has led to greater automation in buying and selling, where 70% of sellers want their leads evaluated by automated processes, 60% of sellers want prioritized deals traced automatically and 80% of buyers now track the progress of their purchased items.
“The pandemic exposed the challenges that many sellers face every day. We knew before the pandemic that sales teams were not performing at their best, but technologies built to help were not being adopted,” according to Denis Pombriant, managing principal, Beagle Research, Inc. “Our data shows today sellers are beginning to embrace AI-based technologies because these new tools are easy to use, offload menial tasks, and give sellers more time to engage customers and ultimately sell.”
Katrina Gosek, vice president, Oracle Fusion Cloud Customer Experience (CX), stated, “Our research shows that sellers want automation technologies that will off-load rather than just simplify tasks. Inputting customer information, documenting milestones, tracking materials shared with the customer, and many other tasks can all be automated to keep sellers focused on what they do best – building relationships and selling.”
You’re Paying Your Sales People HOW MUCH?
This title asks how much you should pay your sales team and how you should structure the sales compensation plan. The HOW MUCH in this title could be describing overpayment or underpayment of your sales team. Where does your pay plan fall? Are you paying your salespeople too much or could it be you are underpaying them? Developing a sales pay plan isn’t terribly hard but it is more difficult than identifying a simple salary range for non-sales positions. I’ll answer the two most common questions about sales play plans. (1) How much should I pay my salespeople? and (2) How should I build the pay plan?
Creating a sales compensation plan can be challenging. I use a Five-Stage approach by breaking it into manageable tasks.
Identify your profit and sales goals and sales expense budget
Evaluate your sales position’s job factors
Identify Individual Sales Goals and Fair Compensation for your position
Come to terms with a structure or blend of salary, commission and bonus
Consider perks and benefits
The first step to planning out a marketing plan is knowing what your company’s profit goals and sales budgets are.
What are the company profit initiatives and what’s the budget for sales compensation?
In order to determine your plan structure, you first want to assess the impacts of your pricing plan on revenue and profitability. Here are the steps:
Calculate the Gross Sales Profit (GSP) or the Gross Profit After Sales, which is made up of operations expenses and desired profit; It is the amount of money needed to fund the Firm’s current operation expenses and desired net profit. It is what is left of top line sales revenue (sales revenue after COGS and sales compensation expense). To determine what this company needs to fund operations and realize their profit, ABC Company has determined that $1.4 million is required.
With every dollar of sales revenue, half has already been spent because it took time and money to establish the product. Your company should divide COGS/SR to get your COGS percentage.
Budgeted Sales Expense Percentage: 15% of sales revenue is the amount budgeted for compensation for salesperson salaries and commissions, bonuses, and expenses. Knowing you have a check and balance helps you plan your compensation program. Use the whole 15% or not at all depending on what your budgeting needs are.
Sales Revenue Goal: By using the goal of $1.4 million in Gross Profit % and other related rates, this means that sales revenue of $4 million would bring the ABC company to its GSP goal.
Some people have said that it makes no sense that we are allocating 50% of the company’s revenue to its cost of goods sold. Here is how I calculated those numbers–we take 50% of the company’s revenue and make sure that 35% goes to its general and administrative costs (GSP) based on what we know COGS is, which is 50%. Lastly, we allocate 15% of the revenue to selling selling expenses (SCE), and 100% of the company’s revenue leaves with you in total.
Divide the Gross Sales Potential of $1,400,000 by 35% (the percentage of sales you’ll be able to create with this amount), which is $40,000 … then multiply this number by 100% (which means you’ll have a total of $4,000,000 in sales) …
Evaluate your job factors
Picking a compensation plan based on company factors such as location and tasks performed can help managers create fair plans. One factor to consider is the fairness of the plan and its ability to justify pay opportunities.
It’s important to know the local market for a similar position if you want to find the best people. It’s necessary to research this in order to find the most talented team members.
In the lead generation process, which steps is it most likely work for salespeople to handle or will the company invest in marketing?
In order for a sales person to provide quality support and be able to share ideas with customers, it takes away from their time finding new business. This can impact your job decision or individual sales goal.
Anyone who has the knowledge of their specific field can be successful in this industry if they have the right compensation program.
The average sales cycle is 6-12 weeks. If the salesperson spends too much time without a sale, their salary or commission may need to be increased. Lowering their salary or commission will increase commission for them.
The number of sales opportunities that a salesperson can take on at one time influences the standard of success that they can achieve.
It usually takes a high level of skill to deal with a complicated sales process. With a more complicated or advanced sales process, one may be required to have more experience and expertise in order to do so. Such people need to be compensated for their efforts.
How much should you pay your salespeople and how much should they sell?
Just because someone completes their sales quota doesn’t mean they are well-compensated. Check with your peers and a salary database to get a better sense of fair compensation for what type of job you are doing. Your individual or team sales quota doesn’t need to be the same as industry norms. The ABC Sample Company determined $90,000 is the median compensation for individuals who meet their target sales quota.
Zippia – Salesperson Salaries
Determine your individual sales goal and make sure it’s stretch-worthy. When looking for a goal, ask other professionals or publishers in the space. Celebrity consumer brands are rare and hard to find, so strive for a goal that would be reached by industry professionals with success, but not the superstars who have already achieved huge success.
At this point, if your product sales percentage falls short of the desired goal, you can figure out how much more money your company needs and comes from your own paycheck. The individual compensation is a function of the goal set in step C above, divided by the number of that goal. The ABC Company needed to allocate 15% to payroll and incentives, so they calculated an expense share of 9% and found they had 6% remaining not accounting for marketing expenses or other unusual financial activities. Once the company has their positive back, they will proceed to taking charge of all operations with their bonus and profit.
Once you set the pay for your employees, it’s time to work on the structure of the plan.
How should you structure the pay plan?
Here is a sample of how to craft a plan for the ABC Company. These aren’t percentages that are standard or set baseline, they are just used here as an example. The ABC Company is sitting in great shape with almost 6% in cash on hand so I have different options for salaries, commissions, or a mix of both.
Commission only with a draw
Commission only is easy to calculate: 9%. You might need to provide incentives for new members and offer stability with the difference in sales.
A draw is an advance on future commissions. When commissions are earned, any draws are diminished from the commissions prior to the check being cut to the sales rep. I prefer offering salary plus commission as it provides the company greater return on over achievement, and demonstrates your commitment to the sales person. In most cases with a draw, if a sales person does not perform, the company rarely recovers the draw, so in essence it’s like a salary.
Salary plus commission
The commission plan stumps many online investors because it seems more complicated and risky to them. In contrast, salary programs are much simpler because they don’t require a lot of set up while still offering the potential for higher rewards. This is precisely why we consider the risk reward option so important as Figure 4 and 5 demonstrate.
Salary Percentage Considerations
A lower salary or draw must be considered in the following situations:
Businesses thrive on a consistent revenue stream. For example, when security systems, office equipment or advertising are the chosen type of sales, salaries can be lower.
A medium salary or draw must be considered in the following scenarios:
When the performance of a business goes up, so do its goals and sales cycles. The many variations create uncertainty in revenue and profitability.
A higher salary or draw must be considered in these scenarios:
High-ticket sales with less sales opportunities and a prolonged sales cycle.
You have a proven performer and they choose and perform better with a salary plus commission in any situation.
Commission Percentage with Salary
When a salesperson makes $1 million in sales, they earn $90,000 based on the mix of elements (salary and commission).
Bonus
Bonuses are designed for the earned income of your business in order to improve certain areas of performance. Bonuses allow you to place emphasis on different areas of your business as needed. The number and types of bonus opportunities should be announced regularly to provide a moving target that improves your earnings.
Commission Percentage
One way of calculating commission might be the high salary rate would pay 1.5% across all sales and the low salary would pay 6%.
Risk/Reward
The company faces more risk with a higher commission and earns more when the employee performs well; this creates momentum for the company to consistently meet and surpass their goals. Employee satisfaction has also been shown to increase due to the better working conditions kept by the company or increased advertising, service, or sales incentives after investing in performance.
Tiered Commission Percentage
Tiered commission structures are designed to be a performance bonus program that is built into a given sales period. A tiered commission structure has an increase in commission percentage as sales increase for a duration. You can use it weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly based on your product or service. A tiered approach could minimize risk on medium to high salary plans as well as provide a built-in incentive to exceed goals. Here is a simple example:
Monthly sales goal of $60,000
Sales between $1 – $30,000 realize a 3% commission
Sales between $31,000 – 60,000 realize a 5% commission
Sales between $60,001+ realize a 10% commission
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