Creating Motivational Sales Career Ladders
By helping people learn and grow in their careers, you’ll make a positive impact on them while moving your business forward at the same time.
Sales leaders that create internal career ladders for their organization will instill motivation, improve retention, and introduce healthy competition.
One of the most appealing features of a sales career is transparency. As your month/quarter comes to an end, everyone in the sales organization has an instant progress report based on their intended quotas.
The quantitative nature of a sales department should make the natural career progression in an organization more straightforward for individual contributors.
Example Ladders
Levers for Management
Business levers are incentives that you can implement to acquire a desired outcome from your sales team. As an individual contributor moves up the career ladder, these are some of the levers that be utilized:
Base pay increase
Higher commission percentages
Fixed bonus amounts for specific milestones
Title changes
Unlocking access to larger accounts
Structure
If I’m a sales rep, the first question I have is “how do I move up the ladder?” Ladders should be part of a larger sales compensation strategy. Think about what your business needs, then pay for it.
For early stage companies, the north star could be transactions or logo acquisitions, while mature companies may focus on revenue generated across the next 6-12 months.
The structure needs to be simple. If sales reps can’t easily understand how they get paid and how they move up within the organization in less than 10 seconds, your plan is likely too complicated to have the impact you’re looking for.
A few options:
Option 1 - Once $X revenue is brought in by the sales rep, the next step in the ladder is unlocked
Option 2 - Sales qualified leads (SQLs) generated and approved by management via a transparent checklist, transactions completed and logos identified and acquired
Implementation
Tie your career ladder to what the business needs to accomplish from a sales goal perspective in the next 12 months.
If you have clarity as to what the average sales representative could accomplish in a month/quarter - and can generate sales compensation plans that will hold for at least 12 months - you are ready to roll out career ladders based purely on consistent revenue-generating performance.
For early stage companies, there is nothing wrong with rolling out a structure that is tied to transactions and then restructuring the plan in 12 months to include promotions tied to consistent revenue-generating performance. The main thing to avoid is making commission plans and ladder changes too frequently. Commit to a plan for a minimum of 6 months before changing it.
PRO TIP: If your sales department consists of younger sales reps that are early in their career, make each step of the promotional ladder attainable within 8 months. This might mean you need to have more steps in the ladder than you’d like, but it will positively impact retention.
Department changes
There is a big difference between selling to SMBs (small to medium-sized businesses), Mid-Market, and Enterprise businesses, from deal cycle to deal size to decision makers. In most companies, these are three different departments that require their own career ladders.
One of the levers to pull with your sales reps is unlocking the capability to work larger accounts. Referencing the sample ladder above, if you have an Account Executive (SMB) that just got promoted to Senior Account Executive (SMB), you have now changed their title, so you could increase their base salary or commission percentages (or both) but you can also unlock working a few larger accounts in the Mid-Market department.
This allows your sales reps to continue doing well for themselves (and your business) in the SMB department, while dipping their toes in the water with a few larger accounts to begin “learning by doing” before they internally interview to move in the next department in a full-time role.
Final Thought
Be sure to provide your employees with a path to grow within your organization. By helping people learn and grow in their careers, you’ll make a positive impact on them while moving your business forward at the same time.