What Your CEO Needs to Know About Sales Compensation: Connecting the Corner Office to the Front Line

The way a company designs its sales compensation program has a greater impact on behavior and results than any sales training, sales management method, or leadership message. Yet most senior executives fail to see the big picture, leading to fundamental misalignments between sales strategy and organizational goals.

Featuring insightful interviews with Fortune 1000 C-level executives and real lessons from the field, this essential book reveals the tough questions leaders should be asking about how sales incentives drive the business. It provides valuable thought models and a Revenue Roadmap identifying the four major competency areas and 16 related disciplines that must connect for an organization to grow profitably. Last but not least, readers will find an interactive report card they can use to grade their own compensation plans.

Sales compensation powers the performance of the entire business. What Your CEO Needs to Know about Sales Compensation casts a spotlight on how leaders at all levels can leverage the strategic power of incentives to reach the ultimate goals of their organization.

Nothing guides and motivates your organization’s sales force more than your sales compensation plan. It has more direct and resounding impact than any leadership message, training program, or strategy you can devise, and directly impacts the bottom line performance of your entire business. Yet most senior executives fail to see the big picture, missing their chance to properly align sales strategy with organizational goals…and most likely wasting money, resources, and effort.

Casting a spotlight on how leaders at all levels can leverage the strategic power of incentives, What Your CEO Needs to Know About Sales Compensation shares stories from top executives in leading companies, helping you ask the big questions, such as: How do our sales roles support our goals? How does sales compensation align with the strategy and sales process? Rather than starting with commissions, then figuring out how much to alter payouts to save money or drive behavior in a different direction, this book provides a critical framework based on author Mark Donnolo’s decades of work with hundreds of high-performing sales organizations. The Revenue Roadmap identifies four major competency areas that must connect for your organization to grow profitably:

Insight

Understand the needs and expectations of your customers, your competitors, the macro market, and your own historic and projected revenue and profit performance to identify how you can use your compensation program to improve value proposition, sales coverage, and the sales process.

Sales Strategy

Define your sales organization’s action plan, including product and service focus, concentration on certain markets, value propositions, and your resulting approach to market.

Customer Coverage

Identify how your organization will use its channels, define sales and support roles, design sales processes, and deploy its resources to go to market.

Enablement

Align your sellers to sales strategy using incentive compensation and quotas, while considering recruiting and retention, training and development, and the tools and technology your organization needs to implement the strategic decisions you’ve made. Containing an Interactive Report Card for grading your current compensation plan, this book provides you with the tools and insight you need to use the strategic power of incentives to reach the ultimate goals of your organization.

MARK DONNOLO has worked as a leading sales effectiveness con­sultant for more than 25 years, helping many Global 2000 com­panies, including Accenture, Bank of America, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, LexisNexis, Office Depot, Orange, Salesforce.com, Sprint, UPS, and Verizon. He is managing partner of Sales­Globe, a leading sales effectiveness con­sult­ing firm, and is a founder of the SalesGlobe Forum, a sales leadership community teamed with top business schools. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.