Offering sales incentive compensation is an important part of attracting and retaining the best talent in the industry. These rewards make any base salary more appealing, provide a competitive edge over other firms that might be looking at the same individuals and make it easy for firms to motivate their sales teams to work harder and bring in more revenue. At the same time, such programs can also sabotage corporate success if not deployed properly.

Creating good environments
As Payscale stated, it's essential that businesses create compensation plans that reflect current employee interests and other trends that help set the tone for corporate success. This means staying in touch with social media outlets, monitoring talent management tools and making certain that personnel are satisfied with incentives as they stand, thereby encouraging more engagement and verifying that existing strategies cater to target audiences.

More importantly, though, performing regular reviews of sales incentive compensation plans helps companies determine if their solutions are still balanced and appealing to employees. If a firm is rewarding staff members on a bias or failing to acknowledge certain achievements and accomplishments that personnel feel are important, it's possible that retention could drop. What's more, if certain workers are perceived as earning more for doing less work, it's possible that entities could see less interest in open positions as potential applicants may see the organization as uncaring in regards to its workforce.

Maintaining current workforce
This is particularly important during the sales process, not just of a single product or service to an individual client, but when an entire firm is merging with another. The focus of a recent Crains Cleveland Business article touched on the importance of stay bonuses and creating commitment to new organizations, retaining legacy talent and carrying over the quality of the previous organization into future endeavors.

Just as with a regular hiring practice, though, the incentive compensation strategy needs to fairly reflect the tenure, title and other factors associated with a commuted employee so that all valuable players from an absorbed firm are sure to stay on with the new office configuration. Ensuring that there are funds set aside for rewarding remaining personnel during a sale or acquisition is an essential part of keeping all employees happy. Whether acquiring new staff through outside hiring or by bringing a second business into existing operations, maintaining compensation standards on a defined scale is an important part of keeping current and incoming employees alike engaged and satisfied.