The quickest way to demotivate a sales team member is to screw with their paycheck. Yet so many times a company will build a compensation plan and commission statement that leads to this. They are outdated, vague, confusing, assuming trust with numbers, and so on. Why?
No matter how great an organization is there are always customer issues. It could be a misunderstanding, personality conflict, a service level issue, or simply customer remorse. Many times all of these at once. As the original relationship builder, the sales professional needs to be able to work with customer issues or as I like to fondly call them, customer heat.
I would constantly hear the term “a teaching opportunity” any time someone made a mistake. At first this kind of bugged me to be honest. It seemed like a kinder, gentler way of saying they screwed up without saying it. As an upfront guy this tactful approach seemed… well… weak. But then as I thought about it more it actually made a lot of sense. These issues/problems should be times for teaching opportunities, not scolding’s, if you’re truly trying to build the best sales team possible.
For the life of me I can not figure out how threatening a persons income has become a “stick” for sales training. “You could always not get paid”, “Your commission will be cut if you don’t…, You screwed up… which cost me.. and now is going to cost you!”. And yet I have witnessed this time and time again by so called “managers”. Why would someone do that? Why would someone let them do that?
