Predicting the long-run profit impact of a contemplated sales force compensation plan

Analytical sales force compensation research offers only limited answers to sales managers who try to devise effective compensation plans, because it often rests on restrictive assumptions, and it considers only simple compensation plan structures. In practice, sales managers need to predict how alternative and relatively complex compensation schemes would affect sales revenues and profits, as well as their likely impacts on sales force morale and turnover. This is why they typically obtain key salespeople’s prior reactions to a new scheme, or pretest the new plan on a limited scale. These procedures, however, may not provide accurate long-run predictions, and they can be applied to only one or two schemes at a time. The paper proposes the application of a simple Markovian model for assessing the long-run impacts of alternative compensation plans on sales and profits, taking into account the associated benefits and/or costs of variations in sales force motivation and turnover. A simple application is provided and implementation issues are discussed.