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

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.

“You cannot afford to overpay or underpay salespeople. Mark Donnolo knows the strategies and the formulas that work. What Your CEO Needs to Know About Sales Compensation will align the C-level and the front line, the compensation and the strategy, and help enhance the profit, the morale, the retention, and the growth of your company. It will also balance the power between salespeople and the rest of the company. This book is a MUST read, MUST do!”

— Jeffrey Gitomer, author of The Little Book of Leadership and The Little Red Book of Selling

“Executives can miss the reality that, at the end of the day, the sales force is their biggest growth engine and a very valuable asset to the company. This book is very important because it shines a light on the strategic connection to sales compensation and starting the conversation for senior leaders.”

— Jeff Connor, Chief Growth Officer, ARAMARK Global Food, Hospitality and Facility Services

“What Your CEO Needs to Know About Sales Compensation offers practical, high-impact advice on constructing effective sales compensation plans. In addition to his own analysis of the subject, Mark Donnolo also includes thoughts and stories from executives in high performing sales organizations on the sales compensation challenges they’ve encountered over the years, sharing what they’ve learned and how they’ve crafted successful sales compensation plans that make a substantial impact. If you buy only one book on this subject, this should be the one!”

— Stephen J. Bistritz, Ed.D., coauthor, Selling to the C-Suite

“Talk about timely! The Big Data explosion has the executive suite more interested in sales effectiveness than ever before. Mark Donnolo has done a wonderful job tying all the pieces together in a very readable format. Too often the C-Suite’s answer to sales challenges is changing sales compensation mechanics. What Your CEO Needs to Know About Sales Compensation does a great job explaining the sales compensation continu­um’s interdependencies. Most senior leaders do not appreciate that solving one aspect of the continuum is not the right answer. As Mark explains, there are over a dozen variables that must be interconnected for a successful sales compensation plan.”

— Ian Levine, Senior Vice President, Sales Strategy & Operations, Iron Mountain