Hire A Sales Superstar

 Salespeople, as you probably know, are a different breed. The typical and incorrect stereotype salesman is the money-motivated, morally-challenged, “make the sale at all costs even if I have to sell my mother into slavery in Angola” kind of individual, with little regard for much else. Further along those lines, common wisdom dictates that sales people go wherever the money is biggest. We know both of these misconceptions are very rare and mostly appear in badly produced made-for-TV movies, but in the majority of cases, they are not.

What is most true however is that it’s not how you compensate your salespeople, its which salespeople you compensate in the first place that matters most. If you have the right salespeople on your team, then they will do everything in their power to be great salespeople, not necessarily for what they’ll get in return, but because they cannot imagine settling for anything else.

Hiring the right salesperson is about finding the person whose genetic code requires that they build excellence for its own sake. This is hard-wired, and cannot be taught or coached, nor can it be changed. This may come as a surprise to many of you, but this character trait is unaffected by a compensation plan. A compensation plan merely realizes their accumulated wealth potential.

The real truth is that on a great sales team, the right salespeople will do the right things and deliver the best results they’re capable of, regardless of the commission plan.

But on great sales teams, incentive comp drives these people differently namely:

The purpose of the incentive comp plan should not be to get the right behaviors from the wrong people, but to get to get the right salespeople on your team in the first place and keep them there.

So all you need to do is hire people who already possess talents and attributes that are hard-wired to this effect. Sounds easy right?

Post a comment and tell me your insights about compensation plans for your people.