Inspire Your Sales Team to Drive Revenue Growth

Your sales team exists to drive revenue growth, but multiple forces including low unemployment and an increasingly competitive landscape can make it difficult to attract, direct, motivate, and retain top sales talent. Driving the right behavior requires a sales compensation plan that is competitive and aligned with corporate objectives. With decades of sales compensation expertise, we help companies maximize their sales force investment through:

Competitive Benchmarking

We can help you clarify your sales compensation philosophy, understand the competitive landscape, organize compelling data on best practices, and identify critical gaps to market.

Successful benchmarking efforts start with defining your own standards for pay and performance, and then finding quantitative market data to determine how your company stacks up against its internal definitions of success and external competitors. Aon's competitive assessments are designed to help business leaders look beyond metrics to identify the underlying causes of declining sales team performance — including difficulty attracting, retaining and engaging talent; disconnects in pay and performance results; and the climbing cost of sales — and make recommend improvements.

 

Incentive Plan Assessments

To gain a complete view of the effectiveness of your incentive plans, you must understand the degree to which your plans are engaging, performance-driven and strategically aligned.

Our assessment process starts with understanding your company's model for growth and go-to-market strategy. We then engage with your leadership team to gain a cross-functional perspective on sales force effectiveness, and the role sales compensation should play in helping to achieve strategic goals. Our multi-phase assessment will help your business identify gaps and build a data-driven, fact-based case for change. We will also meet with your leadership team to discuss our findings and the implications of recommended changes, plus start the process of facilitating buy-in from key parties, including HR, finance, sales leadership, field resources, and sales operations. 

 

Incentive Plan Design

Let us help you deploy a structured and repeatable process to design, model and secure approval for your next sales incentive plan.

Once we've developed design principles through a series of strategic sessions with a cross-functional design team, we test the potential impact of plan design changes by modeling aggregate and employee-level payouts under different performance scenarios. We then compare our experimental payouts with historical results and expected revenue associated with each performance scenario. With multiple scenarios in hand, we then evaluate sales leadership perceptions of proposed changes and gauge sales manager readiness to support those changes. We also help secure executive approval of proposed plan changes by developing a business case and presenting market data on best practices and competitiveness.

 

Sales Plan Implementation

Make sure your sales compensation plans have a positive and long-lasting impact on your sales force and the larger business.

Any change to an employee pay program, no matter how well-crafted, can backfire if it's implemented poorly. And when it comes to your sales team, that can result in stalled growth and a spike in cost of sales. Yet, at the same time, when a new sales incentive plan is implemented with care, it can restore focus and renew profitable growth. With years of plan design and implantation experience, we understand the principles behind an effective rollout.

We'll guide your team through every step of the process — from creating and confirming your communications strategy to building and managing your implementation plan to developing documents and monitoring engagement. We can also help train your managers to deliver a consistent message on the benefits of change.

 

Advanced Sales Metrics

Leverage our market-leading analytics to benchmark the structure of your workforce, understand organization performance, and compare critical compensation spend metrics.

Benchmark workforce design and critical sales metrics to support better strategic decisions by your management team. Identify where your sales organization is over-leveled and inefficient, and where it lags behind peers in deploying sales talent around the globe.

We can answer questions like:

  • Do we have too many layers of management for a company of our size?
  • Is our ratio of managers to individual contributors high relative to the market?
  • Is the mix of our field to inside sales, or sales to pre-sale engineers appropriate given our company's industry and stage of growth?
  • If we double in size and add two more products, how should we structure our sales organization?
  • What kind of labor market will we face if we enter a new country?

From pinpointing cost control issues to planning for growth, our analytics help clients make the most of their investment in sales talent.

 



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