Today, we’re excited to unveil the newest feature in Leaptree Incentivize, Staged Commissions. This allows you to plan and pay sales commissions according to different stages for improved deal quality, higher employee retention rates, and increased levels of customer adoption.
It’s first worth clarifying what we mean by staged commissions. As opposed to a flat rate commission structure where full commission is paid at deal closure, staged commissions allow you to stagger commission payments according to certain milestones being hit by your reps.
For example, a rep could earn fifty percent of their commission rate when a deal is signed. After that, they'll earn an additional twenty percent based on the customer paying their first invoice, and the remaining thirty percent when the customer renews after twelve months.
Unsurprisingly, a staged commission structure can be complicated to plan and manage. Most sales and finance managers rely on spreadsheets to work out their commission plans and that creates a lot of hassle, is extremely time-consuming, and is prone to error.
With the new Staged Commissions feature you can seamlessly add stages into your Incentive plans, allowing you to manage your commissions without ever having to face the headache of manually calculating them in spreadsheets again!
“Sounds complicated, why bother?” you may be thinking! While a Staged Commission structure doesn’t make sense for every business, if it’s a good fit for yours you can expect several key benefits:
A major perk of this type of commission structure is employee retention. If a rep doesn’t get paid their full commission when a deal closes, there’s a huge incentive for them to stay put until they’ve earned the full amount. Furthermore, this new feature provides a running overview statement of outstanding commissions for added insights on progress and payouts at a glance.
The second plus of this approach is improved deal quality (and who doesn’t want that, right?). Aside from the obvious revenue benefits, it means that when a deal is canceled, sales and finance leaders no longer have to deal with messy clawbacks.
Reps are also more invested in the customer and incentivized to stay with the deal long after it’s been closed. This usually results in increased levels of customer adoption and improved customer engagement.
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This latest release makes creating, configuring, and editing complex sales commission plans a breeze – at any scale. The bigger the team, the more crucial a role the right incentive management software should play in your sales management strategy. Say goodbye to lousy manual spreadsheets, once and for all!
Our Staged Commissions feature is included within our Leaptree Incentivize product. To find out more about how we can help you configure this with your Salesforce data, please book a demo →
