Management, STOP Doing This To Your Sales Reps

The BEST sales managers know one crucial fact:

✅ Sales reps are motivated by MONEY!! 💰💰💰

I often have sales managers come to me and ask me to help them set up a cold-calling program for a specific product line.

Often these sales managers are getting pressure from up the chain, asking why their sales reps aren't selling the products they spent so much time researching and producing.

I'm ALWAYS a fan of cold-calling, but it's not magic. If your sales reps aren't selling something, here's why:

❌ Your payment program is accidentally incentivizing your team NOT to sell certain products

Let's say you have 3 product lines, and your comp plan is set up like this:

Overall quota: $1,700,000
Product 1 (Established Product): $1,000,000 quota at 1% commission rate
Product 2 (Disposables for Product 1): $500,000 quota at 1% commission rate
Product 3 (Brand-new product that R&D has researched extensively and sees as the future of the company): $200,000 at 1% commission rate

Do you see the issue here? Why would sales reps spend their precious time selling product 3, when it's going to be a lot more work than just selling Product 1, and they can easily make their quota selling Product 1?

No amount of sales or product training can change behavior if the comp plan is all out of whack.

You must PAY them to work harder to sell Product 3. Make the commission rate higher for those products to get the ball rolling.

Agree or disagree?