You’re a SaaS company, you’ve deployed an outstanding sales process and recruited a team of A-player sales. In other words, you’re almost ready to have killer sales reps to close deals. However, an important question remains: how do you pay them ?
It’s quite tricky to find the right compensation terms to incentivize them in the most effective and fair way without any perverse effect. The devil is definitely in the details. That’s why it is crucial to envisage and anticipate them upstream in order to keep your sales team motivated over time.
We’ve endeavored in this article to compile best practices and main mistakes on this specific matter. We sincerely hope it will help you.
→ If you’re in a hurry, you can download the guidelines at the end of the article ;) This article is co-written with Charles Souillard, COO at Bonitasoft.
Your compensation plan has so much impact on your sales team’s behavior that it must be fully aligned with your business goals, culture and specific objectives. Let’s go through them one by one.
As a B2B SaaS company, your key goals are :
Your compensation plan must integrate those key objectives in a simple way. It is important to note that sales managers and sales reps can — we would rather say should — have different compensation plans.
The different parts of your revenue are generally: