{sidebar id=21}Motivating your sales force takes a certain amount of psychology, mated to solid business analysis.  Like most things dealing with business, it's built on tailoring reward mechanisms to the desired results, and it means knowing your people as well.

First and foremost, for an aggressive sales rep, you need to keep them hungry.  Not starving, but hungry.  Most sales agents will have a personal threshold where the amount of money gained for the amount of work done will reach equilibrium.  What this means is that, after a certain period of time, your aggressive sales agent will be spending enough time managing his existing accounts that he won't be getting you new business.

The key here is to learn when to transition accounts over from your high aggression go-getters to "sustenance" account maintainers, and how to transition them smoothly.  The smooth transition means that you need to get the client's perspective on the change, and that you need to focus on making sure that everyone is compensated fairly for the work done; the aggressive "account hunter" should get a bonus when the account moves over to its new partner within the company, and a second bonus when that partner makes their first sale.  After that, they should move on to getting new business, which is where they're the most valuable.

When building your compensation packages, remember to look at all the effects of what you're doing.  For example, rewarding sales on a percentage of margin will give sales agents a reason to go after as few accounts as they can with higher margins – tripling the margin call will generally result in nine times the compensation.

Conversely, rewarding the sales agent for making new sales will get you lots of "one buy" orders, and poorly qualified sales.  It's best to build your sales structure with intentional reward mechanisms built in, and goal setting; always be aware that any compensation package will be tweaked to meet the current demands and sales goals.

The safest compensation package is usually some sort of base salary coupled with tiered goals and commissions; tailor your goals for a mixture of repeat business and getting new clients for your store…and remember, there is no such thing as paying a Sales Professional too much for bringing in qualified accounts.

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