239: Incentivising Salespeople

<p>Life is full of various rhythms and flows.  We have a set piece most mornings.  Arise, eat, get ready for work, head out the door.  We work, finish, go to the gym, hobby, etc., or go straight home.  Saturday we have a certain flow going on and it is usually different to our Sundays.  We like certainty, predictability, constancy.  That is all fine, because we are all deep in our Comfort Zones.  This is the cuddly place where we have reduced as much risk as possible and we feel safe.  All of this is bad for the sales life.</p> <p> </p> <p>Sales is chaos.  It is fragile, uncertain, unpredictable, unreliable.  We have to learn how to ride the tiger, not how to dismount.  I laughed when watching the movie Kung Fu Panda with my son, when the chubby panda says “my old enemy – stairs”, as he contemplates the long climb to the top of the temple.  In sales, we have an old enemy too and it is called “comfortable”. </p> <p> </p> <p>When we get too comfortable, we stop hustling, pushing, striving, reaching.  We get into a routine because we have built up enough repeater clients to make our numbers or keep our jobs.  Sales should be the ultimate meritocracy, because it is all metrics, easily and constantly measurable – how much have you sold today?  That should mean that people in sales are all high performers, but they are not.  There are many average producers in sales, who still keep their jobs.  They are not totally hopeless enough to get fired, but they don’t shoot the lights out either.</p> <p> </p> <p>Pareto came up with the 80/20 split concept and in any sales organization there are going to be roughly twenty percent of the sales folk accounting for eighty percent of the revenue.  That means that eighty percent of the team are only coughing up twenty percent of the revenue.  If the raw amounts being generated in total are sufficiently large enough then it all works.  Sales managers often tend to be spending their time trying to put a better shade of lipstick on those who are not producing enough.  They should be spe