What Finance Gets Wrong About Sales Compensation with Josh Miller

I'm definitely not a fan of overall payout caps. Now, are there instances where it's necessary to maybe put a cap on how much a sales person could make on an individual sale? Yes, that can be appropriate, because a person could make too much on one sale and have no reason to push harder on the rest of their opportunities in that year or future years. But it's really a big, disincentive to a sales person. If they get an overall payout cap, even if they might not reach it, just the fact that the company is telling them there could be a point where you couldn't keep making sales and we will stop paying you for those sales. It's just a clunky, bad message for a sales person here, even if the odds of them reaching that cap are low. Hard-coded opinions were Glenn and I tell you what we're really thinking. All right, welcome to the latest addition, hard-coded opinions. Today, I want to talk about efficiency. A lot of companies focus on efficiency. I love efficiency. I love efficiency so much that when my wife and I go for walks, I'm like, well, where, let's have a destination so I could do more than one thing at a time. So I'm all about efficiency. But what drives me nuts is when people are so focused on efficiency, they forget the other aspects of the business. When you're going over and talking to someone, maybe in accounting who says, oh, no, we don't want to add more GL accounts or add more departments is going to make the GL less efficient. They're forgetting about why those accounts are there. It's to help the business understand what's going on. And if you could drive greater transparency and better usage of the data, then you know what? Put efficiency aside. No one's going over and saying we need to go over and add 1,000 more GL accounts. But if you talk about five or 10 to get the insight, absolutely you need to do that. In fact, I worked at a company. We were implementing an FPNA system. And there was a consultant who said, we should be combining the legal entity location and department all together into one dimension because it would make for more efficient system. Which is absolutely true. The problem was it was a freaking nightmare to get the data out. So I love the idea of efficiency. By all means, make things efficient. But don't forget why you're out there in the first place is to help the business make better decisions. And so if you're doing something and it's harder for the people who are running the business to figure out what's going on or understand the data, the efficiency doesn't matter. You got to go over and be more flexible around how many GL accounts and how many departments and so on and what dimensions you're setting up because it's about the business and helping people make better decisions not about how efficient the system is. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of FPNA Unlock. We're Finance Meet Strategy. I'm your host, Paul Barnhurst. And this week I'm joined by my trusty co-host, Glenn. Glenn, how you doing? You're doing great, Paul. Always happy to be here. Excited to have you. I almost said Glenn Hopper and then I was like, "No, this is Glenn Snyder." I know, you know what? We're just multiplying all over the place like the Glenn everywhere, I'm sure. So Josh, just so you know, I host shows with two different glens both with two ends. So every so often they get emails and they're like, why are you sending me this? Yup, I have the same problem with the curse of being in Josh Miller. There's always other Josh Miller's in a large company. Yeah, definitely your case. Fortunately, Paul Barnhurst doesn't show up too often as another. Might as often, yeah. Josh would be a common one. Alrighty, well, very excited. We're gonna do an episode this week on Cells Compensation. Glenn, do you wanna go ahead? Just welcome our guest and share anything about the episode and then I'm gonna share a little history about Josh and I before we get started. Yeah, absolutely, so Josh thrilled to have you here. I will let you introduce yourself to the audience in a second. I think this is gonna be a really interesting topic because in my very many years of FPNA, I have constantly had to work with sales ops, doing comp plans, working through, you know, figuring out what the right balance is going to be. It's not a topic that a lot of people in FPNA think is core FPNA, but it really is. If you're supporting a sales team, you've gotta be engaged because of the expense. So I think this is gonna be a great topic and I'm looking forward to it. But Paul, I'll turn it back to you 'cause you guys got a little history here. All right, so Josh Miller, well how long have we known each other now? What's it been 20 years? I think it's been 20 years exactly, yeah. Yeah, so Josh and I both went to grad school full time at Arizona State University and so we had several classes together and got to know each other over those two years and we've loosely kept in touch over time. I've seen him on LinkedIn a few times. We've had a few sales comps, conversations, and when Glenn and I were thinking, hey, who's someone to do sales comp? I know he's ran his own business. I know he's worked for several companies. I thought Josh should come on the show. So I reached out and he was kind enough to say yes. So anything you wanna add, anything embarrassing you remember about me from back then? No, nothing embarrassing, but I remember those years very, very fondly, those were good times. Good, it's a good time. A lot of fun. It was pre-beard, right? Yes, it was pre-beard. Yeah. Well, I did have a goatee for one of the years, I think. You may have, but definitely not as memorable as you're, as you're. No, no, definitely wasn't anywhere near this long. This is, I think, four and a half years of growth now. Yeah. So why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself to our audience. Tell our audience a little bit about your background. Sure. So Josh Miller, I'm currently head of sales compensation at CVS Health and that role I oversee all of the sales compensation strategy and plan design across the many, many business segments that CVS Health is in, including Edna as a large one. I came into CVS Health through Edna. I was previously head of sales compensation there. I also oversee the sales compensation. So all the ongoing calculations and payouts and reporting to make all those bonus and commission plans actually happen. I've been in sales compensation for virtually my whole career since graduate school and a little bit before then as well. Or for several different companies along the way. And I've consulted as well, have a consulting practice where I do a few projects a year for other companies called on target incentives. Well, thanks for the background. And you're definitely the right person to bring on with all that experience. I'm sure with a big company like that, there's had a lot of different divisions, a lot of different plans to keep track of and calculations. We all know calculations are always easy. The data's always clean. But of course you have to work around that. Of course. Especially small companies. Right. We can all say that is finance and so and having done with sales. Yes, a good assumption to start with. We always know that that's BS. Yes. All right. So Josh, I always like to start every episode with this question before we get to our topic. When I say what is great FPNA, what comes to mind? Great question. I think of FPNA as really just a key, key business partner in helping any business make the right decisions. I mean, to come up with a really, really big way of describing it. Obviously, FPNA is coming into the set of responsibilities from a certain lens, a certain angle. But really, the whole purpose of it is to help inform and make good business decisions. Now, there's obviously a whole category of specific decisions related to FPNA when it comes to budgeting and forecasting and other things. But really, all of that is just meant to support business growth. Make sure business is sustainable. And FPNA is right there along for the right, a key hat to work. I like that. I like how you just sum that up so succinctly. It's like help the business make better decisions. And I think Glenn and I have talked a lot about that. So I appreciate that definition. I always love to hear what people who don't work in FPNA say versus those who do, because they always come with a different perspective. So thanks for that. All right. So why don't we dive into the topic? So let's get everyone a little grounded for those people who are in FPNA who maybe has not had the opportunity yet to work with sales ops. Josh, describe for you just to start off. How have you worked with FPNA in your various roles? And kind of not just around the sales planning, but also sales planning. Good question. Well, one of the things I think is unique about sales compensation is that there's really no single best practice answer of where in an organization it sits. And sometimes where it sits is in finance. So I have personally been part of finance owning sales compensation. Now, did that change how I ran sales compensation versus when I'm sitting in other parts of an organization doing the same thing? No, not really. But I just wanted to put that out of it. Sometimes it is actually part of finance depending on where a company puts it. But I would say sales compensation needs to work really closely with finance from many angles. Depending on the company, sales compensation can be a significant expense. And it is obviously by definition a variable expense. So a key thing with sales compensation, aside from the decisions of how you craft it, is simply how you forecast the spend in any given year on sales compensation. And because it's a variable expense, well, what does that depend on? It depends on head count assumptions, sales assumptions, which come in many, many varieties of product mix and seasonality and everything else. And generally, you don't want the sales commentary on making those decisions in a vacuum. and those should be collaborative decisions because those assumptions that are part of the sales compensation forecasting and budgeting should align in theory with assumptions made for other things that are being budgeted and forecasted. So the things are synced up. - You know, let me follow up on that because I've done sales comp, analysis, planning, so on with at many companies. And one of the things that when you start by doing a budget or forecast, oftentimes you start with how are you forecasting sales? And you have to make sure that whatever finance is doing to forecast sales to generate revenue, is the same sales figures that's in the sales comp planning. And oftentimes, you know, they don't connect all the time but we could people aren't talking in the right way, right? So I'm sure you've seen that many times where you're coming up with a forecast for what sales comp is gonna be, but it's not exactly aligned to the bigger picture of the total company sales. - Would you agree? - That's very common. It can be very common to be asked to budget or forecast sales comp. And the starting point is using the current data that you've got or even the past year of historical data that you have. But if there are big business changes going on, then folks in finance may know about underlying assumptions that are changing. And if the sales comp team doesn't know about those changes to come, then you're gonna have a mismatch between the output of the sales compensation forecast and what's being used elsewhere. - We'll talk about this more later. I mean, the other thing as well is, right? You know, not everybody's gonna hit quota. So you also have to, there's assumptions that have to go into that to give you room to maneuver for lack of a better word. And I've seen time for those aren't aligned either. Like company says, "Hey, you should have this much between, you know, quota and what your sales target is." And then you see this much and you're like, "Something's not matching here." So there's a lot of areas, even beyond just having working off the same sales target. There's a lot of assumptions and we'll talk. We'll definitely get into that. But before we do, I'd love to get your thought. You've set just about everywhere in the company. Do you have a preference where you think sales comp should sit in an order? How do you think about that from a structure standpoint? - It's a good question. You're right, I have sat virtually everywhere. I've been part of IT, which sounds funny, but the administration is such a big part of sales compensation, that there's a lot of technology behind that when it's a big enterprise. And so that can mean the company put salt that whole function together with IT. Sometimes it gets spread out. You don't always have a full suite sales compensation department. Sometimes you have a team in finance, a team in HR, a team in total rewards, a team in IT. And they ask the best model. I do think it's a better model when you collect it. I've been in payroll, I've been in accounting. But if I had to pick two places that are probably the top two, and it would be toss up on where best sets, one would be finance, I think, because of this really the ongoing nature of the close relationship there. But the other place would be total rewards and part of the rest of the compensation function, because it is really important to make sure that the philosophy of the sales compensation programs is in alignment with compensation in general, because for the most part, especially in large enterprises, those same sales employees, they're drawing a salary. There might be sign on bonuses when they join enterprise. So there are other elements of compensation beyond the pure bonus and commission plans that you need to make sure that you're philosophically in sync with those things, whether you're sitting in finance or part of the compensation department. So I'd say those are the top two, but either way, it's a cross functional discipline. And so you're gonna be sitting somewhere and working closer with people in your department and outside anyways. - I think you hit on something that's really important, is like I said, it's a cross functional discipline. At the end of the day, we may think finance or total rewards makes the most sense, but the key is that there's the communications happening more than where it sits. Right, if a citizen finance, but there's poor communication, who cares, or if a citizen told a reward, do you need that combination of yes, there may be places that fits better, but I've always thought about it first and foremost, is the right communication happening? And then you figure out from an alignment, what does that mean for the company you're in? - It's correct. - I was a little surprised by your answer, because I would say about 50% of the companies I've worked at, it sits in the sales organization, and it's under the sales leader. So I was kind of surprised that that didn't come up as one of your top places. Why is that? - Yeah, now that is one of the places it can sit to, I think there are some downsides and risks that go with it, but yes, sometimes it sits within sales itself, or part of sales operations or sales enablement, though very often that reports into the head of sales, sometimes it reports that. - What do you think are those biggest risks when, let's say it sits in sales and a report to the head of sales? What's your kind of maybe concerns with that? - In my experience, there needs, I think of it as checks and balances in our government, and I think that it helps when there's separation in how you compensate the sales people from the actual sales leadership that is directly overseeing those sales people. It helps there to be a separation in knowing individual sales people and directly managing them, separating out, as much as you can, the decisions on how you're gonna pay them. Ultimately, you're still gonna have a cross-functional group making sales compensation decisions. It's never me as a sales compensation leader, making decisions in a vacuum is a dictator, and it's all collaborative. Most of it is in various forms of committees, depending on what type of a decision is that's being made. Sales leaders are inevitably part of those committees, so they have a voice that is that it helps when there's at least that minimum level of separation by putting that function somewhere else. But does that mean there aren't examples where it works well, you know, still reporting into a head of sales? No, it can work well. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I've just seen downsides from it. - Yeah, I mean, it's actually interesting. I mean, I've seen it work really well, and then I've also seen where we'll use to term conflict of interest pop up, where you go over and you have the head of sales, who says, "I really want this person, "let's figure out a way to make that person, "make a little more money," and that's not necessarily the appropriate thing. You usually don't hate that too much in a large organization with smaller companies. You know, the rules are a little more laxed. But let's think, let's talk for a second about putting together those strategic plans, and you know, it's bringing together the strategic compensation plans, because there are various items that go into these plans, and you know, not only does finance in HR have a lot of the data they're available to them, but sometimes the outside of the sales team, but talk about some of those key elements that when you think about putting together a sales plan, or I should say, a sales compensation plan, what are some of those key elements that you look for? You know, it's where the data. - Yeah, great question. To me, there is a single foundational item that is the most important thing, and is simultaneously the thing that most often trips companies up, and that foundational thing is you have to have alignment and be crisp on what exactly is each sales job responsible for? What is it delivering? If you have, you know, every, virtually every sales organization has multiple roles, and if the organization doesn't clearly know and hasn't topped through exactly, what are the outcomes? What are the results that we expect out of this sales role, a versus role b? If you're not crisp about those decisions, then everything downstream is going to fail. You know, sales compensation, it is, it's thought of as incentive compensation. You are trying to incentivize certain behaviors, obviously because you're trying to get certain results. But if you don't know at a job level, what results you're trying to drive, then the incentives can't work because you're not getting the exact behaviors and results that you're intending on. And that step in my head, the sales compensation planning process is arguably five or six steps. That step, step one is so often underestimated in the importance of it. And it's so important to get alignment across all those functional areas that are in a committee, get alignment on that, get it in writing. There's no reason that it shouldn't be fully transparent to everybody involved, including the people in that job, exactly what's expected out of them, and how that relates to jobs BC and D that may exist too. You can't just throw them all into the same program and not be crisp about who's responsible for what and expect it to work. Now, are there exceptions to things? Of course, there are exceptions to things. If you're expecting something to work a certain way, 80% of the time, and there's 20% of wiggle room, that's okay. I'm not saying that you have to work out 100% of it, but you need to get the mainstream sales process understood as clearly as possible. And you'd be amazed at how often that part is forgotten. What I see often from a finance leadership standpoint is finance leaders will often understand what the overall outcomes are that's expected, but it's really gotta be thought through at a job level. Because sales compensation is not done in aggregate. I mean, yes, you can pull it all together and aggregate it. sure, but you're really making job level decisions. And so whoever's part of that process, I think the finance leaders really got to get down to that level of detail and understand the job level of differences so that we can make the job level sales compensation decisions accordingly. Right. I mean, I think you hit on something which is you're incentivizing behavior. That's ultimately what you're doing. And every salesperson I've ever worked with, as soon as they get a new comp plan, they're spending half a day going through every detail of that comp plan figuring out how do I make the most money here? Sure. If you are incentivizing something that you don't really want that behavior too bad, that salesperson is going to be going right there because that's where they're going to make the most money. So you really have to make sure that you're paying people the most in the behavior if you want to drive the most. And communicating appropriately like it it shouldn't be a mystery to the salesperson. You know, they shouldn't have to spend too long digging in the comp plan to find out how they're going to make the most money. That can be part of a messaging. Here is where you can make the most money. Let's show it. So you understand it and talk about the why behind it. There's no reason to hide. We've probably all seen and I wish I had it here. I've seen it before. The meme were big, huge formula on the chalkboard finance explaining the sales comp plan. You know, something along those lines and it shows this whole page of formulas. And we've all seen those in the sales guys like they're just hoping they made what they think they might have made, but they have no idea. So that gets more into I think the actual plan. But there's a bigger picture I want to dig into a little further. You you talked about job level. So where's the biggest misalignment? To me, I would guess it's kind of between hunters and gathers. How much of this account role is really selling? How much of his retention? How much does a salesperson have a job to manage a customer after the sell or they're dropping everything? Being really crisp on those in each job? To me, it would seem like one of the most common areas that finance doesn't really understand. And that if there's not clear alignment, kind of just hoses everything downstream for lack of a better word. Is that probably the biggest thing or what are the other? I would agree that is a common one. Obviously when, you know, we usually use the terminology hunters and farmers. And yes, when somebody hunts the new business successfully, are they going to be involved at least for a while in establishing that customer relationship and handing things over to somebody else that's going to mention our ongoing basis? Yes. But they are different skill sets. And so generally speaking, it is best to separate those roles. Now, are there examples in some companies or of certain people that are able to do both jobs I may plus level? Yes, but it's rare. And it's rare enough that it's generally not something that's advisable to rely on and build your org structure based on that expectations, but to separate those two roles out. So yes, finance very often doesn't necessarily realize that those are completely different jobs, completely different groups of people. You know, if we paid one role very well for bringing in the business and now we're paying a second person for managing it on an ongoing basis and getting renewals, getting growth out of it, cross-selling the products, they're not necessarily the same person that got the big reward of getting the customer in the door in the first place. And so it's important for everybody involved to understand those are very often different people, different jobs. The other thing that I see very commonly though is what I call the difference between generalists and specialists. Very often a company has multiple product lines and one or two products might be considered the primary ones. And then other ones might be secondary ones that could get upsold at the time of the initial sale or might be upsold at later points in time. And the more products a company has, the more common it is for there to be somebody that is the overall relationship owner and somebody else that might be a subject matter expert in one particular product or a group of products. And so that's very often a collaborative sale or person A is bringing in person B. And that's another situation where it's helpful to really be crisp on if is person A really running the show all the way through the closing of the deal and person B is a temporary help coming in and giving a product demo or talking deeply about a product or is person A handing the sale over to person B. You know, neither one is wrong, but it's important to be crisp on what is the design of the process because those are very different sets of responsibilities. Or is it sometimes one and sometimes the other in which case, okay, so you need to build flexibility into your processes and complements to pay differently based on those situations, sharing leads collaborative selling, who owns what lead when it comes in, how does it get transferred, all that stuff needs to be clear. Or you're going to have infighting between your teams. It's just natural because it's their livelihood that you're now telling them that you weren't clear on. Oh, no, that sell goes to so and so, but I did 90% of the work who's heard that one before, right? We all have if we've done sales cop. Actually, along those lines, I mean, I've seen a couple different programs, you know, it's a compensation program where one would say no one salesperson can get more than like 60% of the complements of the commission, which makes it forces that collaboration saying you got to have at least someone else there to pick up the other 40% and when you have I think multiple products and you're trying to do more cross-selling, I think it's a great approach. But at the same time, if it's there's not a lot of cross-selling, you run into this issue of, well, I'm doing all the work, I can only get 60%. So now I got to go find someone to go pick up the other 40. I mean, you know, it's kind of an awkward thing. When you think about, you know, what you have seen, what structure do you like? Do you like having kind of a hard cap that forces collaboration? Or do you like having no cap and someone can actually just keep 100% to themselves? Today's sponsor is Linios. 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There's nothing cleaner than one person owning it from beginning to end. So I don't like building a process that prevents that from happening. If that is possible, then I'd rather allow it to happen and not overcomplicate things by requiring a second or a third person involved. To me, it really comes down to the design of the sales process itself, though. You don't want to put the sales person in the position of really having to design the sales process. That should be separate from them. The sales person is executing the design, whether that's a one person beginning to end sale or one person and bringing in a subject matter expert. Those decisions should be made out, slightly from them, and they're focused on executing. You don't want the sales person ever be in a position where they're making decisions about a process more for what they will personally get out of it versus what's going to get the deal closed at the best numbers possible for the enterprise. And if the answer is that the odds go up by having a second person involved, then that should be the process. And it's not necessarily the sales person's decision whether to do that. It's following the process. And that's the expectation. Yeah, no, I agree. In fact, there's that conflict of interesting again, right? If they have the incentive to go and they get paid more for it, they might try and do what's not necessarily best for the company, but what's best for them. But by removing that and having someone else make that decision, it's no longer, you know, you remove that conflict, which I think is great. One of the other conflicts, if you will, you don't work again, that that I've also seen is base salary versus variable, right? Where is the right balance? Because if you put too high of a base, you could get some people who could say, look, you know what? Yeah, even if I don't sell, I'm getting paid. I'm okay. You know, that type of thing, which is not the incentive that you really want to have at the same time. If you have no base there, you make it all incentive, you know, incentive base for variable, that also kind of drives the wrong behaviors. How do you find that right balance? It's difficult. You know, that's that's definitely a very contentious topic. One way we think about it is is it goes back to the job level decisions again, of the nature of the sales job does lend itself to what kind of a balance might be more appropriate for it. So, for example, a new sales job, a hunter job, it's definitely more appropriate for that kind. a job to have a more aggressive pay mix, meaning more of their take-home pay coming from the sales comp plan versus the base salary, then it would be appropriate for a farmer role, somebody managing existing customers. And the reason is because of the balance that a new salesperson has between upside and downside. You can give a new salesperson a $3 million quota, and technically there's nothing stopping known from selling $10 million, you know, $300 plus quota payment. Obviously they have all the downside risk as well. There's a chance they could sell zero. So it's a very, very volatile on the new sales side. For farmer roles, usually called account executive roles, you don't have quite that level of volatility. It's really not possible for a farmer role to triple the size of their book or book of business, at least in any consistent way. They, you know, they might have a once in a blue moon gross situation falling to their laps, but that's a once in a blue moon situation. So they don't have that same upside potential as a new, as a new business person does. They still have a lot of downside risk, but it's a little harder for an existing business salesperson to lose all of their customers. That's a lot more infrequent than for a new salesperson to have a goose seg of a year or not, and not make any sales. So, so one just high level best practices, existing business roles should have a less aggressive pay mix. And by less aggressive, I would say something between the 70, 30 and 80, 20 range as far as the mix between base salary and variable pay versus new sales, you know, you can get much more aggressive than that. I would say 50, 50 is very common in a lot of corporate hunter roles. Some companies choose, you know, philosophically choose to go more aggressive than that and go 30 70. It's not wrong. That's just a philosophical decision. But would you ever want to go 30 70 for an existing business person? No, that would be putting, you know, too much risk on their part of being in balance between downside and upside to to that person. Separately from that, I would say as you go through sales management roles, the sales managers are obviously getting one or two steps removed from the actual selling. The more removed they get, the less leverage the sales compensation plan should be. So, if you have a team of hunters that are leveraged of 50 50, you don't want the managers above them to be 50 50. They should be a step back from that 60 40, maybe 70 65 35 and then go even incrementally farther than that if you go up another level. Just because the more up and levels you get, the more indirect their influences over the results. But also the more up and levels you get, you want them to have more of that long-term view. You want them thinking more as a business owner. So, it's really trying to balance. I think in the terms of as mercenary versus business owner of the more aggressive you get in that payments, the more you're encouraging a mercenary mindset, which isn't necessarily bad, but you need to be intentional about what the balance point is on how much of a mercenary do you want them to be because it's mercenary versus business. If you go, you know, zero one hundred, you're not really giving them any reason to care about the company's long-term outlook other than their ability to stay employed. And so you want to step back a little bit from that and and give them some reason to still think as a business owner. I've seen some zero one hundred before people say they're one hundred percent variable and I always cringe. I'm just like, I would not want to be working for that for that company. I'll ask kind of a follow up question to that. What's your thought? Right, when you hire new salespeople, you have to have a ramp. Nobody comes in and has a full book of business. They're up to speed on day one or very rarely. So how do you think about compensating them during a period, right? Because they have an on target earning, which they're hoping to earn. Let's just say, you know, it's a one third, two third split and it's 300,000 for some failed salesperson, right? So maybe you hundred variable, a hundred. Do you completely, your preference, you think about making them whole? I think this is an area of finance often misses is making sure they think about that. If you're hiring a lot of new salespeople, you know, how do you manage that? You do a draw and they all look back. What do you have a preference? Your thoughts on that. There are a million ways of doing that. I'll talk about a few principles behind it. So the first principle I've touched on is it very much depends on the sales cycle that that company has. The longer the sales cycle is, the more intentionally you need to be about what kind of a ramp program are you going to use? Because that means that the person starts on day one and let's say it's very commonly an 18 month sales cycle. Then the first possible sales, they're going to be selling your 18 months from that higher day. And so how are you going to bridge them from, you know, day one to that day and 18 months? And that's assuming best case scenario. So first thing is really thinking through that because that sort of sets the timeframe you're dealing with with the whole thing. So that's one principle out there. Second principle is you want to give them skin in the game on being able to close the deals that they can. If you if you over guarantee too much, which there are a lot of, you know, whether it's through, you know, sometimes it's called a draw. Sometimes it's called a guarantee. But if you over guarantee far beyond what they're going to actually be able to realistically close in whatever that time period is six months, 12 months, then you're not leaving enough skin in the game and you're basically sending an unintended signal to the salesperson that they can coast a little bit because they're not going to be earning based on their actual performance for a longer period of time. You want them to give, have reason to still deliver their performance from day one, whatever that day is. Now how you achieve that, I don't think there's any one size fits all solution to it. Guarantees are a very common mechanism for it. It's really thought, you have to be really thoughtful about what is the length of the guarantee and what is the amount of the guarantee because you've got to balance. You need to be able to guarantee enough to incentivize the right candidates to come in because you want to have high performing salespeople that often means bring in experienced rain makers that have been elsewhere and they're not going to come if there's not some kind of a program to help them in that bridge transition. And so you've got to be really intentional about that amount being enough to bring them in but not so much to encourage them in any way to put their feet up. Another way that is sometimes supplemental is using what are called MBOs. MBOs stands for management by objectives. And what that's really referring to is if there's a really long sales cycle, you know, in normal circumstances, you want your sales incentive plans to be based on actual financial results and not based on activities. But in bridge or ramp-up situations, that may be one of the few times when you don't have results to pay on yet. And so you go and you find what are the actual intermediate steps that the seller could be doing that you want to incentivize that ultimately lead to a sale that might be 18 months away. So it might be them starting to build those relationships with customers or even internal stakeholders and you find those objectives and you build compensation around those that it's not meant to be the long-term program but it's something to incentivize them taking those intermediate steps that will set them up for success in the long sales cycle situations. So those are a few things but it's definitely an area where there's definitely not a one-size-fits-all solution to it and it very much depends on company. So Josh, as you're talking, I'm thinking back throughout my my career and not only things that I've done but things that the company does, I'm thinking, God, you know what, there's so many times that we did not do things in the right way. And you know, I think so I want to get you to kind of kick off of them, Paul, you should probably chime in too because I'm sure you've seen some things where just finance has taken a bad approach or did some kind of give some examples of where you see some of the most common mistakes from finance around sales, calm sales, complaining, you know, this way that the audience who's primarily, you know, FPNA people, they can kind of keep some of those things in mind and try and repeat some of the mistakes that maybe we've seen. Yeah, I would say two big ones come to my mind of, you know, one is the finance folks not getting involved early enough to understand the sales process and who's doing what because if you don't know who's doing what, then you're not able to make good decisions on how you properly, how do you properly compensate person A versus person B? The second goes back to the forecasting. How you set performance targets, sales targets, quotas, you know, many different terms used for that same concept. Finance has an instinct rightfully so to hopefully want budgets and forecasts to be as accurate as possible. And so if if more current information comes in and the budget isn't finalized yet, then a finance person's instinct is to take that new information into account and put that information into the budget in one form or another. When you take that instinct though and apply it to setting sales targets for sales people or quotas, it can have some downstream unintended side effects. And so here's an example. Companies that have very long sales cycles often find out well in advance of the actual financial result hitting may know that we have successfully won a big deal or lost a big customer. If you know that far enough in advance, is it appropriate to build that known information into the sales targets, whether it's for the new sales people or the existing business people. I would argue note is not if the normal if a person's normal selling expectation would be you know 300 units a year and we have advanced knowledge that a certain person is is probably going to land a deal for a thousand units. Is it appropriately appropriate to suddenly give that person a quarter of a thousand units instead of 300? No, from a budget standpoint it makes sense to to counter that on the budget but in the in the quarter you've just taken off the top side for that person delivering you know once in a blue moon result they should experience and be paid the upside that comes from delivering that that rare sale. The reverse can be true as well though if you have people that are paid based on retention results and you know far in advance of a large customer that's been lost and you then bake that in to your attention expectations. You might be giving an unintended advantage to a group of people or a single person that had this large negative result and in reality you may want to still hold them to the expectation of no and normal circumstances we want to get a 90% retention rate or 95% retention rate and we're not going to arbitrarily lower it to 60% because we know that we lost this one big customer. It goes in both directions the upside and the downside should be experienced but even with that there's a balance to it you know you don't necessarily want to bake in specific known results but you know looking at an aggregate let's say a company is intentionally investing in a new product line and is investing so much that they're willing to lower cost for a certain year and so there's expected to be higher volume because lower cost well that's not specific to one person that means that probably in general for that selling cycle the whole group of sellers should be held to the higher selling expectation because that's what aligns with the business strategy for that year so that's different than the scenario that I was talking about but that's a pretty common thing that I've seen. Thank you for your answer there Josh I think you make a great point where obviously the finance person wants budget and sells plan to match but there are times what you put in the budget versus how you incentivize somebody because of extenuating circumstances need to be different to incentivize and get the right behavior from the sales people or to treat them fairly in some cases is something that's happening in the business may not be fair and if you don't adjust for it you're gonna lose a bunch of people. So you've got to remember sales plans are out in incentive and behavior and so you may need to make exceptions regardless of how you build it into the budget for those individuals and that that's a give and take and that's not there's not a simple formula for that that's where judgment and experience and having those open communication is really important because there's not a one-size-fits-all it's why it's an exception. So I'll share a few things the one I was sharing that I've seen finance people try to do we had a leader that tried to normalize sells throughout the year so we wouldn't have any quarter-end sales and I was like that's really more the company they know that's the others quarter targets and your public and you can't really force yourself people to fix that through a math problem so that's what I've seen or I was like no others I've seen is it makes great sense on paper did anyone stop and think if can actually be calculated that way with any reasonable amount of accuracy or in a reasonable time like Lee had one where we wanted you know to pay everybody on actual which needed to happen but the process to do it was the plan was an absolutely nightmare to administer because of the way our data was and you know of course I got to inherit it all and someone else built it it was I mean I don't know 100 hours just building to back end to get a month's calculation you know they got better but so I think that's another one you got to think about the data and the third is being real careful how you're paying people I had one situation where we paid people on estimates and they ended up bringing in note they're bringing it up bringing less sales then we paid out in commissions in the first 18 months of all the companies because of the way this program was set up and I'm going to caught it and kind of raise the flag we got the plans fixed it's like we can't pay people on an estimate when there's no requirement for that person to buy anything they could have done zero and were paying them off an estimate so I've seen just things like that where there's just kind of misaligned either data how you're paying people trying to force solve problems with complexity rarely does that ever work with a salesperson all it does is usually aggravate them because they can't regret what they're getting paid yeah yeah it's a it's a behavioral science I've given talks at conferences on the psychology behind it because it's a form of behavior economics which which has always fascinated me you know an example that comes to my mind that I've seen also along lines of what you said is you know sort of like a rewarding you know you you want to reward a kid or any person for some positive behavior result you want the reward to be as quick as possible after they've delivered that result where companies sometimes have a lag between when the sale is delivered and when the finance or the revenue is actually recognized where there's a lag there come he's got to be thoughtful about do they want the salesperson to experience that lag is it if the salesperson delivered it on day one and the revenue isn't going to come in and be recognized for nine months later I mean there's a really intentional thing that needs to be thought through there on if you want the salesperson to keep selling you may want to front the money as quickly as possible after the sale was closed but come up with other internal controls to make sure that the revenue is actually going to come in sure you could have clawbacks with their clawback if necessary you know there are other mechanisms to think through but you don't necessarily wanted to fault to just waiting all the time for the full revenue to be recognized and make the sales person wait that long or you know you create a situation where they're not being as motivated as they as they could be through that sale Glenn I know you have a few you've done plenty of plans I do in fact actually one of them is the exact opposite of what Josh just said so I got to hang out to start with that and that was where all the incentive was paid up front it was it was a real estate company and so the people were paying for when they sold real estate and it was 50% when the transaction was with signed the contract was signed 50% all moving but the thing is is that some of the leases were six seven years and what ended up happening was is clients like salespeople had really big clients those really big clients would make all these purchases at one time and then they're like well you know what we're not going to do anything for the next five years and the sales guy gets paid everything up front and then quits to company walks out with the cash because he's like well I'm not gonna make any more money it's next five years so I'm gonna go to a competitor and you know and continue to get paid so that was one where it was I would say I think and what I would like to see more of is alignment of compensation with revenue I think I agree with what Josh said 50% maybe something like that up front great the other 50% should be as the company earns the revenue over those seven years let that build up so that four or five years down the road they're making so much money from past sales they can't lead you know that's if you have a good salesperson that's kind of how you want them to be locked in so that was one thing I've seen two others that I've had real quick is where you go in and you you make a change to the comp plan and basically you're now paying people more money to do the same or less sales and then did the year before all right so that's one of the things you always got to do that comparison I think in finance has missed that a few times where they make the changes and now it's like oh we're gonna incentivize the sales team more to do less not really what you're going after right so so that that's one and then the last one is just making things overly complex and I think Paul you you hit that as well that you go over and you want to pay on every tiny little different thing and you have all these different rates and different rate tables that it takes like three months just to go over and calculate one month of sales commission because it's just too complicated no one can figure out what's going on and I think in that case you lose the incentive because the salesperson is not only spending so much time trying to figure out how they're going to make more money they're they're not sure exactly one thing has come in then they're questioning their paycheck about what they thought and it just is a mess so I agree I take Paul you you mentioned to simplicity is usually the better way to go but that's that's just as I said some of the issues that I have seen today's episode is brought to you by our sponsor Linios Linios brings live ERP data directly into Excel allowing your team to build reports with fresh data no still files in site more on that in a few minutes and simplicity is hard I completely agree you want it to be as as clear and simple as possible and that does not happen by default it takes a lot of work to prioritize things and make things as simple as possible and understand that when you're prioritizing and making things simple that means that not everything is going to be in there you know and so that so all these things are line that goes back to the payments conversation of does everything need to be in the sales conversation plant? No, not everything, you know, the salary should pay for things. Part of that is around trying to help help the business the sales people think like a business owner and part of it is around, you don't want to over complicate the comp plan and have 20,000 things in there. You want it to be simple and and going back to your your real estate example, too, it makes me think about the job alignment question of is this is that was the sales person that situation where they purely responsible for bringing in new customers or where they responsible for the ongoing relationship with that customer. Theoretically, if they're only responsible for getting new customers in the door, then you might be doing a disservice to the company to pay them too much of a long tail, where they're being paid on past sales, because that means they're being subsidized, and they have less skin, the game to be constantly hunting new customers. And if they don't have new customers to hunt, then that's a different problem to solve. That's usually not a sales compensation problem. No, and that's right. And in that case, the guy was the he was paid for bringing in business that they, you know, that was the main thing, but he was also the account manager for a couple of the key clients. And when one of those key clients has made a bunch of purchases, he's like, I'm not getting anything from these guys anymore for the next five years, but that's the job that I would completely agree than then it wouldn't be appropriate to completely front load it. Because part of their job is ongoing part, but if their job was a 100% just getting them in the door, then it might be more appropriate to front load it so that they're constantly having incentive to go hunt more, not more, not more. And I would agree. Right. But the yeah, it's exactly because if your job is to not only bring in the business, but to take care of the clients that you bring in, then you have that you you run into that you don't want to completely front load them. And I think this gets back to the what you said, the foundational first thing is understanding people's roles. Because you have a clear understanding of the role, you should design the plan accordingly. Well, let me get your thoughts, sort of things we talked about sometimes where, you know, you you make a new plan or everybody's getting paid more for the same amount of work. I've seen the opposite where you keep cramming down and keep expecting the cells to hit higher and higher targets, or you have quota caps, where hey, you can earn over a certain amount. Can any thoughts on all that to me? I'll share my thought I'd love yours, Josh, feels like quota caps, the continuing cram down usually is going to incentivize the wrong behavior. You're going to get people wanting to lead. You have to be extremely careful with that. I'm generally not a fan, but how do you think about that? You're af your after year. I'll start with the cap part. Now, are there instances where it's necessary to maybe put a cap on how much a salesperson could make on an individual sale? Yes, that can be appropriate, because a person could make too much on one sale and have, you know, no reason to push harder on the rest of their opportunities in that year or future years. If they get an overall payout cap, if they even if they might not reach it, just the fact of the company is telling them, there could be a point where you couldn't keep making sales. And we will stop paying you for those sales. It's just a clunky, bad message for a salesperson here, even if the odds of them reaching that cap are low. And so right now, you're just sort of introducing a little bit of a of a disincentive to the salesperson. On the topic of, you know, just sort of cramming more on the salesperson, that is a real thing, you know, and obviously, we all live in an environment where we're all expected to deliver growth targets every year. We won't revenue to grow to faster rate than expenses in general. And so if that's an expectation, then there is going to be some form of that that applies to the salespeople. And that's why you just have to look at both sides of the equation. Are we expecting more from the salesperson, but are at the same time? Are we, are we looking at the total earnings opportunity that we're giving them and growing that at least at a commensurate rate or something where it feels like it's an alignment? It's got to be looked at it's really difficult if the expectations go up, but everything else stays fixed. You know, that's a hard, yeah, it's a hard message for any salesperson that understands. By the way, I want to go back to the the captain call just I worked at a company where they did have a cap per quarter. And what would happen is the sales guys would get to towards, you know, if they hit their cap, there's two weeks left on the quarter, they delay their sales. Yeah, they delayed the sale. They hold on to it. And then all of a sudden, it's like it's coming the next quarter, which that's again, it comes back to that's not the behaviors that you're trying to go over and instead of on this. And I think that's where it really comes down to when you think about just having the right behaviors and having the plan incentivize the behaviors that you want. If you could do those two things, you are probably going to land in a good spot. And that's where it's like some of the other game playing, I think that goes on about trying to manipulate the system, either from the sales team or from the company side, it just usually makes the sales can't plan much more inefficient, right? So I'm going to share what a professor and it relates here, said to us in our entrepreneurship class, he goes, all of you are complaining about you're going to complain about your taxes when you start your own business, goes, the fact that you're paying more taxes means you made more, stop whining was basically his message. She's like, now don't do, that doesn't mean don't plan and do certain things in Q4 to save your taxes or whatever that are legitimate. But don't play, spend all these times playing games. If you incentivize sales to play games, or you cap their ability to earn, you're hurting yourself. If your salesperson is making more than a CEO great, that probably means he's selling a ton. You're growing everybody should be happy if you design the plan well. So don't worry about, well, that just doesn't seem right to pay this person not amount. If they're able to sell that well, God bless them, as I like to say, I have seen that of a CFO react negatively to even the sheer possibility of a sales person making more than a C-suite level person a year. And when that happens, it's not a bad thing. It's something to really celebrate. Should it be, if it's happening consistently by the same person, then that raises some questions on, are they that much of a superstar, or are there some advantages that they have that are building that up? But no, I mean, it should not be something that has looked upon badly. That's really something to celebrate when it happens. But you know, there's such a balance between all this of being being thoughtful about not giving disincentives to people, which a cap might be an example of that, or that, or that other program that I could think of where not willing to pay a salesperson more than 60% of the total value of a sale. Well, then you're disincentivizing those simple single person sale situations. But at the same time, a company's got to be really thoughtful about internal controls. And thinking through what are the controls in place to make sure that people aren't able to take advantage in bad ways. You know, you want to be thoughtful about how you're building the plan. And you want people to take advantage of certain things in the comp plan. But at the same time, you know, there's a balance all these things and just requires a lot of thought loss. You know, there's one other thing that we haven't really touched on, but you guys really made me think about it is cashflow. Because if you're a small business, and you sell a lot and your sales are just going through the roof, if you don't know how to properly manage that cycle, and especially if it's you're selling up front, and then you've got to manufacture the goods on demand, and then you have to collect, you know, 30, 60 days with something like that afterwards. You could actually run out of cash, and you could throw the company out of business. So for all you people off there who are working at small startup companies, you got to keep in mind how, you know, you can't just put a great sales comp plan in place paid by each people up front. They sell everything and they sell so much that you're all your cash is going out the door to the sales guys, and now you can't, you know, you don't have enough cash to make in the company. So just another, I mean, obviously for large companies, you know, you know, Josh, you mentioned you work at CVS, that's not really going to be an issue for you, you need. But if you're a startup, I'd have seen lots of companies grow too fast and end up going under because they didn't manage their cash properly because of that too. I'm waiting for me to have that problem plan. Yeah. Well, Paul, it sounds like you need to change your sales plan. I'm considering incentivizing myself more. Josh, can I hire you to build myself sure? We can figure that out. So I think, you know, as we head toward the end here, I want to ask you one more question, Josh, and I think we'll give everybody kind of last, you know, their last thoughts here. So if there's a finance person who's been tasked with building sales plans, that happened to me where I had never built a sales plan in my life, I'd calculate them for a while. And I was also asked to figure out all the sales plans. And I made plenty of mistakes. If I did it again, I wouldn't have been as aggressive. I think I should, the salespeople were learning as much. I created some some bad behavior, some disincentive more than I thought I would. So learn a lot from that experience. Are there books, frameworks? What would you recommend to finance people? So listen to call it gets put in that situation because it can be really tough. There are a couple of books out there that folks have written. There's a book by a guy named David Chicali that's written on incentivizing the sales horse. That's probably the biggest book that's been around a while. But there are a couple of other books on it. But like with anything, there's plenty of literature out there on the internet that if a person just wanted to educate themselves on sales compensation, there's plenty out there to give themselves the foundational things. There is an organization called World of Work that is the main organization that runs certifications for various types of total awards, jobs, so benefits, professionals, compensation, professionals, executive compensation, and sales compensation. So they have certifications in these things that they run classes all the time in these topics. And they put out a lot of publications. So that's another avenue. Some of that content is free. Some of it is pay water, expects a membership. But there are enough sales comp folks out there like myself that are usually willing to do a quick call and just help point somebody in the right direction, even if it's not going to be any formal project or advising anybody on something. I'm always happy to just point people in the right direction on the foundational things because we just want to build up the knowledge base and the better we can all do on it. The better we can call it to the beat. Love it. Thanks. Why don't we go ahead and do last words and maybe Glenn, I'll let you go. I'll go. And then Josh will give you kind of last thoughts. And as you give your last thoughts, just let people know how they can find you, reach out to you a little bit about your business at the end of that as well. So someone wants to contact you. They know how. Go ahead, Glenn. So I'm going to throw two things. One, just kind of best practice that I have found when I have built out a lot of sales comp plans is when you go over and you model it out, make sure that you take your forecast that you're modeling and you plug in the prior year sales results as well. And you want to make sure you're comparing year over year. This way, then you could go over and say, wait a second, if you sell the exact same way, how does the conversation should you generally want it to be the same? Maybe if you're trying to change behavior, you might want to, you know, you'll see that. And you'll make sure that you'll at least not be way off one side or the other, but because you're looking at actual results, you could compare how people actually got calm in like the prior year and how they would get calm in the prior year if they were on this new plan that you designed. And I guess it's a great way to level set. But I think the other thing is just that the number one key is make sure you're incentivizing the behavior that you want. I think that's a big theme. And if you go easy to go out and sell, say, hey, we want to go over and pay people for sales, but are they selling the products that you want them to be selling? Are they selling in the way that you want them to be selling? Those types of behaviors are really where the incentive comes to play because you don't want to just say, hey, we're going to pay everybody for the same for every sale. When one product, you might be making a 5% margin. Another one you make a 50% margin, you really will care if are you indifferent really between selling those two? I doubt it. So you want to make sure you're incentivizing, you know, what the behaviors are that you really want and the sales team will typically follow it. So two thoughts. One gets back as something Josh said earlier. One of my favorite quotes and I think of this in financial models, but it applies to almost everything in sales comp, especially complex is easy, simple is hard. People take more work, focus on making it simple with the right incentives and that will win over every time over complex was maybe even slightly better incentives because people don't understand it. You got to look at the entire psychology. It's not just the incentives on paper. So I think that's the first thing I would say. The other ones are one, make sure you involve everybody in the business and as a finance person, remember, you have a responsibility ultimately for the dollars and this gets more than just sales comp, but I also had to approve sales and there are many times I had to say, look, I can't do that. I still remember I had a boss say to me, I asked him for feedback. He goes, you need to be, you need to be mean more often. First of all, I don't want to be like you because this guy had her reputation for being beyond mean. We'll put it that way. But later on, I realized what he's saying is you have to push back. You have a fiduciary responsibility here and you can't just agree to everything. And there's always going to be exceptions with sales plans. All of them have holes. So you need to find that right balance and there's times you're going to disappoint somebody. You have to be willing to do that in finance, but keep in mind the broader picture when you do that. Also, what it means to the person, what it means to the company, and be willing to have those open conversations versus just being the no police as finance is known for Josh, your last thoughts over to you. You guys made great points there that two things that I will give, number one, repeating myself a little bit, but just the key depth of understanding of the actual sales job that each job needs to be delivering and understanding what I'll call the sales motions. If the job is 100% responsible for bringing new customers, that's a very different sales plan than somebody whose job is 50% bringing them in and then 50% keeping them for the next five years. You know, neither one is wrong, but getting clarity up front and designing the plan around that is really key. Second thing goes to the cross-functional aspect of it of none of these plans work well when they're designed and maintained by any single person. It takes all of those different perspectives, finance needs to have a seat at the table, HR needs to have a seat at the table, sales leadership and business leadership needs to have a seat at the table, and everybody's got to come together as clunky as that can be and get alignment on what is the right path for. You have to have that willingness to, as you just said, Paul, push back if you disagree. Everybody has their producer responsibilities, and it's only when you bring that collective hole together that you really can land at the best decisions possible. All right. Let our audience know where they can learn more about you a little bit about your business and then we'll wrap this thing up. I really just consult on the side here and there, so it gives me the ability to be very picky about when I take projects and which ones I take on, but it's all through my consultant privacy on target incentives. So there's on target incentives.com, the website explains a little bit of the consultant practice, but it does have a lot of the articles that I've written over the years. I'm a lot of them through water work I mentioned earlier, so if somebody that's just learning sales compensation, those articles would be one of the ways that somebody could start educating themselves, couldn't be reached through that website or directed by email at Josh at on target incentives.com. Perfect. Well, thank you for that, Josh. Thanks for joining us. Thanks as always for joining Glenn, and we hope everybody enjoyed this next time you're doing a sales plan. Give it a listen and remind yourself to find that right balance because it's not easy. So thank you, everyone. Thank you. Josh, hard-coded opinions were Glenn and I tell you what we're really thinking. All right, welcome to another hard-coded opinion. I'm going to give mine this whole clickbait hype, Excel is dead. All that stuff is just BS. I'm so tired of the exaggeration that people put out there to build up their name, to sell something. You know, I've seen ones build a model in five minutes, finish your budget in 30 minutes, Excel is dead, all these tools replaced it. It's all just marketing hype and the sad part, it works, but it shouldn't. So let's take Excel. Anyone who thinks Excel is dead is just playing along. For some people use Excel, yes, less with AI, yes, and should they, in some cases, yes, will some people use it more? Yes, I did a poll, so I asked people, I've done it twice over the last year, and both times about 80% said they're using Excel the same or more. Okay, so let's look at what Excel's done. Well, let's just look at what the industry's done, Claude, that Excel killer, what do they use as a spreadsheet, Excel, what have they built an app inside Excel? What did ChatGPT do, build an app inside Excel? What did 20 other plus companies do, build an app inside Excel? What is Copilot done, built an app inside Excel, basically, right, and add in, not technically an app, but they call it an add in, all allowing you to do more with Excel. Is the way you work in Excel changing for sure, no question, Copilot continues to get better, all the other apps. In addition to that, Excel just made one of its biggest changes in the years. You can now add multiple values in a single cell, which allows a lot more functionality. You'll see more about that as it gets released in general, but they continue to invest, being a Microsoft MVP, I see it, and I'm not saying Excel's for everybody, but what I am saying is you guys got to stop and think when you see these arguments that things are dead. Excel is still very much alive, it's transparent, it's audible, it has plenty of great use cases. Financial modeling is alive, it hasn't died, Power BI hasn't died, nobody's building their budget in 30 minutes. If you see hype around FPNA that just you know can't be true, then just step away, because the person is trying to sell you something or they just want to be famous, it's clickbait. Stop and think and remember the tools to spreadsheet, whether Excel goes away, the spreadsheet definitely is never going anywhere. And AI is not the answer for everything. So all right, that's my hard-coded opinion, that's my rant. I'm off my soapbox, thank you for listening. - That's it for today's episode of FPNA Unlocked. If you enjoy FPNA Unlocked, please take a moment to leave a five-star rating and review. It's the best way to support the FPNA guy and help more FPNA professionals discover the show. Remember, you can earn CPE credit for this episode by visiting earmarkcpe.com, downloading the app and completing the quiz. If you need continuing education credits for the FPAC certification, complete the quiz and reach out to me directly. Thanks for listening, I'm Paul Barnhurst, the FPNA guy, and I'll see you next time. (upbeat music)