Comp/Bonus Plan for Upsells/Cross-Sells in a non-Saas Company

Heidi Schmidt

Hi
I am happy to have this network to lean on. I manage a Client Service team at a programmatic agency.  We manage digital campaigns not a SaaS product or software.  I am trying to craft a comp plan for the team that will reward them for upsells. Currently, there is nothing in place as CS is a new department for the org. CS manages the set up and campaign launch prep, reporting, project management.  The upsell would be a new responsibility, and I want my team to be compensated if they bring in more revenue.

The CEO wants CS to upsell and cross-sell; however, the CFO keeps rejecting comp ideas by saying -- why am I going to double dip to pay CS and then I have to pay Sales commission on his business. It's frustrating and I have not structured a commission plan for a department so I am hoping for guidance.

Since my team is Client Service and not Customer Success I'd like to give the team a commission if they upsell a new channel or product, or the client runs more lines of business with us. We are too small to have a separate Customer Success team, so for now the role is a hybrid of both.

My question is:  how can I structure the commission to reward my team for the upsells that won't compete or interfere with the Sales comp plan?  How can I get this to pass approval with the CFO?  

Thank you!

Heidi

AaronEsau

I worked at Hexcel (a manufacturing company) who tried to implement Customer Success as "Inside Sales" (I didn't know much about CSM it at the time, but this is definitely what they were doing just under a different name). The senior leadership had just heard this trendy concept and was pushing it to be implemented throughout the organization, so it did help that there was direction from top to implement. It also helped that the minimum purchase requirement for most products was like $10K and it was a very difficult to source product.

I worked with my manager at the time and we had to start small to get the incentives approved with plans to expand/increase them once they were more established. They also had us targeting the smaller clients that our Sales Team were not heavily invested in (or rather which they didn't have time to deal with because they were focusing on the 4-5 clients that made up 60% of the business).

A lot of the incentives/bonuses started small to get were broken into Team and Personal goals (if team goal is reached - Team Vacation with/without spouses).

Team Goals
 - As a team if we got $100,000 in quotes closed

Personal Incentives were like
   $75 gift card for 2+ NON-solicited recommendations/kudos from customers
   $25 visa gift card if individual had $25,000 in quotes closed (realistically this was like 2 quotes given the price of the product)
   $50 visa gift card if we had $50,000 in quotes closed
   $100 visa gift card if we had $75,000 in quotes closed

Heidi Schmidt

I like this idea.  Thank you for your feedback and ideas.  This might help to get it started