Always be aware of the actual behaviors resulting from a sales compensation package. Negative results might take the form of poor sales figures, declining customer satisfaction, gains by your competitors, or other areas of concern for the business. Additionally, though, you might find some negative results within your team itself. Let’s look at a few of the results of poorly designed or administered sales compensation packages:

• Declining Sales Revenue. Maybe it’s really a decline in their enthusiasm to sell your products or services.

• Decreasing Gross Margins. Perhaps there is a lack of attention to negotiations because of pressure to move on.

• Lack of Broad Product Portfolio Sales. The compensation plan might be driving single product sales.

• New Product Failure Rate. Maybe the quality of order entry is poor because of overloaded schedules.

• Concentration on Limited Number of Customers. There might be a limited reinforcement for prospecting or an over-balance on servicing existing customers.

• Poor Customer-Satisfaction Surveys. Perhaps your compensation plan is causing your salespeople to ignore customer concerns, requirements, or timelines.

• Competitor Gains. Some plans drive salespeople to look for ‘‘low-hanging fruit’’ and stay away from accounts where there is competitive activity. Unfortunately, these avoided accounts are usually the customers with the highest potential.

• Long Sales Cycles. Perhaps there is too much of a comfort zone and not enough incentive to move a sale rapidly through the sales cycle.

• Inordinate Number of Failed Opportunities. The compensation plan you put together may have driven the professionals to overextend themselves to the point of being able to identify new opportunities well, but not be able to move them through the sales process. Sometimes, they are overrecognized for new opportunity identification, but there is no negative reinforcement for failure to position the organization to win the opportunity.

• Negative External Perception of the Sales Professional. In this instance, you may find negative comments being made by other departments about your sales team’s ‘‘shoot-from-the-hip’’ approach or their tendency to be ‘‘yes men.’’ Maybe your reward systems need to have some additive that will support a more positive attitude about the sales team by such functions as engineering, technical services, and accounting personnel.

• Resistance to Change. This may be caused by salespeople’s having a preconception of possible negative results. In other words, there will be no net under them if the change doesn’t work. In most instances, sales professionals feel as if they have successfully mastered their world. Any change could endanger that success, which will have a negative effect on corporate, professional, and personal goals.

• High Turnover. The plan may place too much at risk in a very volatile environment. In other words, salespeople’s income fluctuates too much for them ever to feel a sense of partnership and security.

• Risk Avoidance. In this instance, sales professionals resist taking chances with an account because they fear that there will be a negative backlash if the risk fails. Check your plan and do a little simulation. What would be the consequences to a salesperson if she spent time on developing a new market approach or a new order entry process? Your plan should support and encourage risk taking when it does not place the company at risk.

• Cross-Organizational Communications Breakdown. Perhaps your sales team does not work with other departments. If team members fall 2 percent short of their sales objective but have made a major contribution to corporate quality improvement processes, are they punished?

• Secretiveness, Lack of Information Sharing, and No Teaming. Perhaps your plan does not encourage partnering among, and across, the sales team. Do team members seem hesitant to even tell you what they are working on? A poorly designed compensation plan can cause overcompetitiveness and mistrust in the organizational environment.

• Anger, Frustration, and Conflict. This is usually caused by sales compensation plans that are hard to understand, ever-changing, and perceived as being unfair