Customer Reviews

Compensating the Sales Force: A Practical Guide to Designing Winning Sales Compensation Plans

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Very basic, beginning book to sales for compensation. Might be more appropriately entitled, "Sales comp for dummies". If you already know anything at all about sales comp, it's really not for you.

Like most CEOs of companies I started off as an Engineer. I understand Engineering very well and my company's Engineering staff is second to none. The problems come in the sales department where I started by proposing simple base plus commission pay structure and wondered for a couple of years why my sales force was achieving the dollar volume but didn't meet other goals such as new product launch, product mix, new market mix and other goals. This book has given me great insight on how to tweak the sales compensation to do these things. I've already tried talking and motivating sales staff to do these other goals but in the end with the sales department it's all about greed and the money. Money talks and adjusting the sales compensation plan is a great tool to achieving your company's goals. The last two years my company's sales staff really kicks b***. We are outselling the competition 3 to 1 when in all markets when we go head to head with them. I highly recommend this book.

This is an excelent book by the top author on Sales pay. Very understandable and good tatical knowledge.

Keep this book among your collection of professional books. It's a no-nonsense guide that goes directly to the heart of how you design incentive programs for sales people in different jobs. David Cichelli describes, in detail, the finite number of formula mechanics used to pay incentives. He also describes when to use the mechanics, the math behind each formula, and popular variations of each mechanic. If you're looking for a book on the psychology of incentive programs, this isn't it. It is, however, a primer on specific sales incentive program types. Every HR or Comp Analyst should be familiar with these concepts - if not for your career, then for the sake of the people working in sales and the company's bottom line.

I now understand why large corporations are confused. This book has many pages of verbiage with even more useless graphs. Perhaps corporate vice presidents who need to justify their existence can wave this book around and generate reams of computer reports to wade through while their corporate bosses walk down the halls, but as far as creating a practical working program forget it. I would like to have my money back.
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This guy David J. Cichelli just gave me a call! I will say one thing for him. He is sincere and extremely intelligent. After a warm friendly conversation he helped me with my plans. So I don't want my money back after all! In fact I definitely will be looking for him to write some industry specific books in the future. I truly wish him well.

I don't find them very useful, I was looking for more simplified information for my very small business. I can see where this would be very helpful in a large organizition, but this was overkill for me.