"Three years ago, my organization was going through a period where a large portion of our sales force was turning over and the lack of retention and consistency was having a major impact on our customers and overall sales. After I obtained information from employee exit interviews, it turns out that most of our salesforce was leaving to take jobs with a more consistent and larger salary based pay structure. For many years prior, our sales staff were compensated on a full incentive and commission base. I assured my HR Director and CEO that I would begin a compensation study right away and I quickly found out that most of our competitors paid about 50-75% of total compensation on a base salary and the remaining percentage on commission and pay for performance. Knowing that our sales staff were always in the 60-80k range for annual compensation, I worked with our sales director to build a new compensation package that involved 50% base salary, 40% commission and 10% monthly pay for performance. Moving forward, we were able to recruit back a couple of strong sales team members that had previously left and keep our great team together to this day."
