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Rainmakers vs. team If a few superstars are responsible for a large majority of a firm’s sales, and receive the bulk of the incentives, chances are the firm has an unhealthy rewards structure. O P I N I O N
T ogether everyone achieves more. TEAM has long been a familiar mantra among companies looking to guide employees toward a common corporate goal. In the sales and business development arena of most A/E firms, it’s also been a rallying call for building topline revenues. However, when it comes to incentivizing a firm’s sales effort, a poorly-conceived reward program can serve to undermine the collaborative tenants on which the TEAM concept is based, and affect not only the success of the sales effort, but its overall sustainability, as well.
Marc Florian
BACKGROUND. In an effort to bolster sales or central- ize accountability, many firms will hire rainmak- ers or designate marketing executives within a particular client sector. Typically, these firms will reward successful sales efforts and quantitatively measure and contrast the success of these efforts among individuals and business units by crediting the sales of an entire business unit to the rain- maker or marketing executive assigned to that unit. However, the task of differentiating who was actually responsible for the effort that led to the successful sale, or what actually contributed to the win, is often overlooked. "Is your reward program building a collaborative salesforce or generating internal competition and resentment toward those being rewarded?" While the practice of claiming marketing credits and responsibility for key client revenues among senior management is longstanding, the process has an equally longstanding reputation for generating contempt among middle and junior- level staff who might in fact have been responsible for much (if not all), of the heavy lifting, or who might now manage the account for which credits seem to accrue in perpetuity to the original rainmaker. HEALTH AND SUSTAINABILITY. In a healthy and sustain- able organization, the majority of sales don’t re- sult from the efforts of a single individual. After all, the owners and directors of A/E firms don’t want to lay awake at night worrying about their chief marketing executives in terms of whether or not they are being recruited by the competition, or how their sales forecasts would be devastated if their rainmaker was to be hit by a truck on the way
Courtesy, Marc Florian
See MARC FLORIAN, page 10
THE ZWEIG LETTER May 16, 2016, ISSUE 1152
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