How to compensate your sales team in a startup
Sales team pay structure for early stage business
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Paying employees in a startup
How to pay a startup team is one of the most important questions and key to your business success. It’s difficult to decide how much you can afford to pay before you start making money in a cash-hungry early stage company. However, you know that to take the business off the ground, you need to attract highly performing people and reward them for results.
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There are different approaches and different pay structures possible to use, here is one of them.
Take your business further
Pay components for a startup sales team
1. Base salary
If you want your employees to work effectively, they shouldn’t worry about covering their basic bills. Find out what are the costs of living in their area, what financial commitments they have and make sure they don’t stress out about covering the basics.
2. Sales targets
Set clear sales goals and rewards.
3. A variable component
Set a monthly pay component dependent on the sales. It should be based on a growing scale of sales volumes – the more your employees sell, the more they earn.
4. Sales accelerators
Add to your pay system incentives for meeting and exceeding 100% of the sales targets. This will be a top up to the variable component, an extra bonus for super results.
5. Have a sales manager
As early as you can, appoint a sales manager for your team and set team targets for them. This way you will have someone to motivate your people and get the most of the team effort.
You can make a difference
The key to successful implementation of your startup pay system will be defining and communicating it upfront. Your employees need to know the targets and rewards to have the sense of fair treatment, feel good about their work and stay motivated.
I hope these tips on how to compensate your team in a startup help you get some clarity. Have a look at other articles related to managing startups:
