fast-growing B2B2C company that needed to drive for incentives every quarter has changed sales grow its sales team quickly in a competitive market reps’ mindsets, fostering an attitude of collective focused on career opportunities as a pitch to both partnership to drive the business forward, while candidates and its existing salesforce—reps were removing much internal politics. not just joining a sales team, but had a definitive path with significant career options, both within and Simplicity is another hallmark of successful beyond sales. This helped the company not only incentive structures. Leading companies tie hire strong people, but also keep many of its top financial incentives to only one or two core metrics performers. that they want to drive and that are aligned across the entire commercial organization. Promote long-term strategic incentives. Financial incentives are unlikely to disappear completely, but For example, one company’s inside sales center some companies, especially in industries with long needed to address attrition; the problem wasn’t lead times, are starting to restructure incentives the rate of attrition, it was who was leaving. On to get away from quarterly or annual targets. More average, attrition was less than 20 percent, but customer-centric attitudes can be achieved by that masked dramatic variations across business offering sales reps multi-year quotas and incentives units: some were losing more than 40 percent to develop an ownership mindset. of sales staff. Attrition correlated with quota attainment, but while quotas were uniform across Some fast-growing companies have even removed territories, the territories themselves differed quotas. A leading technology company now pays greatly in their potential. The company switched the no variable compensation to its B2B salesforce. major performance metric from quotas to growth, Instead, it has introduced a long-term compensation allowing strong sellers to benefit from upselling model where top-performing talent gets ranked while not being under threat from canceled deals. higher, promoted earlier, and receives more stock. This retention effort alone was responsible for Since the stock takes several years to vest, sales preserving $20 million in revenues. reps tend to stay with the company. Not having to 32 Future of B2B sales: The big reframe