10%+ attrition in sales teams is linked to Incentives! How as a Sales Manager - you can ensure it doesn’t happen in your team?

As a sales manager, we have all been in a situation, where one of our reps is really frustrated, because her incentives paid by the company are not as per expectations.

• The first thought I will get is if she is a high performer, what can I do to retain her
• Second, I will ask the rep to draft an email with all the detailed working and send it to Sales Compensation team to resolve the query
• Third, wait for long, sometimes months to get the answer to the query ….

Meanwhile, the sales rep gets another job and does not think twice to leave the organisation and I lose a high performer. As a manager, did I fail in retaining the high performing team member? Yes, Upto 10% of attrition is attributed to reps’ non alignment with sales incentive policies and processes in the organisation. 

One of your responsibility, as a sales manager is to make sure that your team take home maximum possible earnings in the form of incentives. It is not that hard to coach and guide your team on this. If you follow 4 simple steps, you can ensure that you do not lose any of your high performing rep, atleast not because of sales incentives. 

• As soon as incentive circulars are released, you should have a detailed session with your team and make them understand nuances of incentive schemes, help them know all the riders and conditions 
• Plan with each individual, how they can achieve their incentives on all possible KPIs by giving them a step by step guide. Eg. If say, they can earn incentive on achieving their target for one product, help them break it, by customer, by geography, by channel and by time periods 
• Do a weekly/monthly catch up with the team on the current earnings v/s potential earnings. If your incentive cycle is quarterly, do a monthly catch up for first two months and possibly every week in the last month. Discuss with them, if they are behind or ahead. Having an incentive solution which helps you and your team keep track of earnings will be useful here
• Finally, at the end of the incentive cycle, help them calculate their earnings so that they know what to expect as part of their paycheck. If they fail to achieve any component of their incentives, help them analyse, how they can earn more in next cycle. 

Following these steps would ensure that each of your rep is on top of their sales incentive earnings and stay in your team for many-many happy incentive cycles.