"You May Run The Risks, My Friend, But I Do The Cutting. If We Cut Down My Percentage... Who Knows? It Might Just Interfere With My Aim." Blondie Many private companies consider the implementation of a formal annual bonus plan to be something "required" prior to an IPO. After all, if you pay people to... Continue Reading →
Anyone who has watched Mad Men, will know that back in the 1920s, cigarette advertising was big business. The rival companies spent millions on advertising campaigns to persuade customers to switch to their brand. Famously (although I hadn't heard about it until Mad Men), Lucky Strike came up with the campaign slogan, "Its toasted" which... Continue Reading →
"Yeah, fugazi, fogazi. It’s a wazi, it’s a woozi. It’s fairy dust. It doesn’t exist, it’s never landed, it is no matter, it’s not on the elemental charge" It may seem like fugazi but Compensation Cost of Sales (CCOS) could be the difference between sales plan success and failure. In simple terms, CCOS is the... Continue Reading →
This is an interesting question, and does require some thought. To which level of role should geo-differentials be applied? To start with, what is a geographic differential? Well, typically when creating salary ranges, or benchmarks, rather than creating a midpoint for every position/level in every city in a given country, we will group cities and... Continue Reading →
In my experience, companies tend to struggle with managing sales programs in Europe far more than they do in North America. There is certainly no simple answer as to how to build a European sales team but acknowledging the challenges and understanding the variables will certainly make the process more straightforward. I've attempted to categorize... Continue Reading →
There are all kinds of reasons to generate benchmark data. It might be for a specific job that you are struggling to hire for, it may be for a new region or country where there are no structures in place, or for a hiring manager that wants to look more closely at a particular position.... Continue Reading →
Market data is great - I love it, you love it, everyone loves it. We love it because it informs us about the market and allows us to be more confident in making decisions. Problems with market data arise from over-reliance where it shifts from informing decisions, to making them. If we have 50th percentile... Continue Reading →
Actually, no, let's not call the whole thing off, let's clear this up once and for all. Many people capitalize spiffs claiming it to be an acronym for "Special Purpose Incentive for Field Force" or any one of several possible acronyms. Let's be clear - it does not stand for ANYTHING. At best it is... Continue Reading →
This is exactly what Jacob Gonik set out to achieve for IBM Brazil in the 1970s. The starting point is that if we want an effective sales plan, there needs to be some notion of expectation in the form of a goal or quota. The challenge, as most of us know, is knowing what that... Continue Reading →
I hear this usage a lot, "Maybe we can give them an MBO" or "I'd like to include MBOs in the plan". However, this doesn't really make sense so permit me a short rant if you will. MBO stands for "Management By Objectives" which means it isn't a measure, it is a process. The approach... Continue Reading →