Alexander Group Publishes 2020 Sales Compensation Hot Topics Survey Results

Companies are eager to protect sellers' compensation and offer incentives for both sellers and buyers to restart sales due to the COVID-19 crisis, according to the results from the Alexander Group's 2020 Sales Compensation Hot Topics Survey. Featuring 135 participants, the Alexander Group collected survey data in June and published the results in July.

To learn more about the survey findings, click here to watch a 30-minute video on the survey findings.

"The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on revenues is becoming more well-known to companies. The majority of companies plan to provide some amount of incentive pay protection for sellers. However, the percent of companies planning some element of pay protection has declined by over 18% since our last survey in April," said David Cichelli, survey editor and revenue growth advisor of the Alexander Group. "Perhaps the impact on incentive earnings is not as great as previously feared," Cichelli added.

Key Highlights

• COVID-19 Pay Protection: 64.2% of the companies will make changes to sellers' compensation due to COVID-19. For companies where the negative impact on revenue was greater than 15%, 70.8% of the responding companies will provide some form of partial incentive compensation pay protection. The common method is a pay guarantee, but other techniques are prevalent too.
• Restart Techniques: Half of the companies plan to provide additional seller and buyer incentives to help restart sales.
• Recurring Revenue: Account managers and territory representatives are frequently responsible for renewal revenue. Half of the companies treat new and renewal revenues the same for compensation purposes. For the most part, revenue crediting occurs at time of sale regardless of contract expiration date.
• Program Implementation Late Start Practices: Most companies implement their pay programs on time. One-third of the companies provide a draw to offset any program late start.
• Pre-Booking Incentives: Almost half of the companies use pre-booking incentives for one or more of their customer contact jobs.

About Alexander Group

The Alexander Group provides revenue growth consulting services to the world's leading sales, marketing and service organizations. Founded in 1985, Alexander Group combines deep experience, proven methodologies and data-driven insights to help revenue leaders anticipate change, align their go-to-customer resources with company goals and make better informed decisions with one goal in mind?to grow revenue. The Alexander Group has offices in Atlanta, Chicago, London, New York, San Francisco, São Paulo, Scottsdale and Vero Beach.