How do the commissions displayed in real-time improve your sales team’s motivation and performance?

6 minutes read

A decade ago, it was considered normal for sales reps to wait for weeks (or sometimes even months) to get rewarded for

The long hours that they have put in at work
The hard work that they have done to close various sales deals
And the extraordinary results that they have generated

At that time, the sales reps also had

The patience to wait for their rewards
And the trust that their reward would be delivered accurately when the time comes

But in today’s tech-savvy world where the whole world is accessible to people in a couple of seconds on their portable devices, it is impractical to expect salespeople to wait for weeks just to know how much commission they have earned.

Modern-day salespeople think of their work and commissions very differently. They expect everything to be immediate. They want to know how much commission they would get on every small or big win that they’ve achieved. So delaying to convey their commissions is a bad idea. It not only demotivates your employees but can also significantly bring down their productivity levels.

So, its time for sales departments to adopt and implement Real-time commissions/ rewards

What are real-time commissions and rewards?

Real-time commissions refer to the implementation of a system that automatically calculates the commissions of all reps whenever they make progress and updates them on what they have earned in real-time. Here the commission updates go from weeks to minutes or seconds.

By having their commissions right in front of their eyes, sales reps can be carefree about their earnings and focus on their sales activities.

How does displaying commissions in real-time benefit your sales team and management?

Here are some sure shot benefits that you receive by displaying real-time commissions:

1. Improves work satisfaction and motivates better performance from your reps

Just imagine these scenarios,

One of your sales reps just had a successful meeting with a client and closed a major deal with them. And by the time she comes out of the meeting room she gets a notification on her phone saying: “Congratulations on closing that deal. You’ve earned $1000”
Some other day she enters 100 leads into the sales pipeline and meets her monthly target. And then immediately her phone beeps and she sees that she has earned $500 for it.

Wouldn’t this significantly improve her work satisfaction, engagement, and motivation to strive harder and perform even better? That’s the power of real-time commissions. It facilitates a way for your reps to almost immediately see what they have earned for every small and big progress that they make.

2. Lowers Employee Churn Rate

Employees usually leave organizations,

Either if they think that they aren’t able to contribute and grow at their organization
Or if they think that their contributions aren’t valued at their organization

With the real-time sale commissions, you’ll be able to solve both these issues. It appreciates your sales reps for their contributions and lets them know how much commission they have earned for it. This helps in engaging your employees in their work and significantly reduces employee turnover across the board.

3. Makes it easy for reps to meet their personal financial goals

Every one of us have certain personal financial goals that we want to achieve to fulfill our dreams, isn’t it? Now wouldn’t it be amazingly motivating for your reps if they have the minute to minute data on

How much they have earned so far?
And what targets should they meet to earn more?

This way, your people will be able to analyze exactly how much more should they earn to meet their personal financial goals

Live real-time updates about their earnings will motivate them to work harder to meet your business goals and their personal financial goals simultaneously.

4. Reps don’t have to spend time calculating their commissions

The system that displays the commissions in real-time, ensures accurate calculation of commissions before sending out the commission updates to the reps. So, your reps don’t have to worry about the commission calculations. Or spend time calculating their earnings after every sales win. They will directly get to see the status of their commissions in an app on their mobile device.

This,

Saves a lot of time for them
Decreases employees’ stress and uncertainty at the end of the commission period
And enables them to focus their precious time on selling instead of calculating commissions

5. Makes it easy to settle commission disputes

When the employees’ commissions are not updated in real-time and are not made transparent to the employees, there is a huge chance that commission disputes are going to arise. So in case of commission disputes, how are sales ops and sales reps going to settle them?

Firstly there is going to be a lot of back and forth emails between the sales ops and sales reps about the dispute
Then there will be rechecking and recalculation of commissions (which is a lengthy process in itself)
Then there is going to be an exchange of emails again clarifying things
And then finally it gets settled

All of this takes a lot of time. Both for the sales employees and the sales ops.

But with real-time commissions,

There is very little chance of manual errors as commissions of hundred of reps are calculated automatically
There will be transparency of data between the sales reps and the sales ops which leaves very less room for disputes between them
Even if a dispute does arise, based on the data, both the parties can make informed decisions and resolve the dispute in minutes or even seconds

Learn about the psychological aspects that you need to consider while developing a sales compensation plan

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Learn how to make your sales compensation plan motivating for your managers

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Learn how design, implement and gamify your sales incentive plan

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Published on Wed Apr 20 2022