10 Best practice: Make customer-level reporting available to sales reps in an understandable and actionable manner. Empower sales reps to dive into the details and know exactly how customer accounts are consuming, who or what is driving consumption, and what use cases look like. 3. Match sales talent to customer needs. Sales reps have different strengths: some are more suited to working in greenfield territories and closing new deals, while others are better at working with customers to dig into challenges and uncover use cases. Sales managers play an instrumental role in identifying and assigning the right talent for the various customer stages and territories. Best practice: Introduce territory profiles and tailor sales teams to what’s required for a particular region and its accounts. Give sales managers the flexibility to assign or hire sales reps to match the territory. Weight each rep’s plan between bookings and consumption, based on skill sets and the territory type (greenfield vs. mature). 4. Infuse customer success into company culture. Consumption changes the way organizations think about customers, how accounts grow, and what will lead to financial success. Each customer is unique and represents an opportunity to discover new use cases (and revenue). Sales reps become customer advocates whose job is to expand consumption and deliver more value to the customer. However, everyone in the company must orient their work around customer use cases to ensure consumption increases and value is delivered. Best practice: Promote “customer success” as a company-wide initiative, not as a separate function or team. Enable sales reps to become the guardians of the entire customer lifecycle and relationship. Adopt a customer-first attitude across the entire organization to align all efforts in support of customer needs. COMPENSATION STRUCTURE THAT REFLECTS THE NEW ROLE FOR SALES REPS Compensation should be based on the value customers realize through using the solution and the active role that sales reps play in that discovery. The measurement, of course, is customer consumption. The overall incentive structure should reward sales reps who recognize their new role and act as long-term customer advocates for value. Keep in mind that there is a certain amount of inertia contained in consumption. Even when customers start out strong, usage may flatten; you must build upon usage over time if you want to gain sustainable momentum and growth. Sales reps are your defense against slowdowns, so it behooves you to incentivize them to address slowdowns immediately, work with the customer to find new use cases, and get usage patterns back on an upward trajectory. In addition, it’s important to set quota appropriately and articulate clearly how much each salesperson holds and must accomplish for the year (and what exactly they get paid on). Here are seven considerations that will help you design a compensation structure where incentives and quota for sales reps line up with customer consumption and value: 1. Align compensation plan with product and sales strategy. Depending on your target customer segments and user onboarding experience, you may have a “sales-led” or “product-led” growth model (or some mix of both). Product-led usually begins with on-demand accounts where users start using the solution on their own. Engagement with a sales rep happens once a pattern of strong consumption has been demonstrated and conversion to a committed contract makes sense. Compensation should align primarily to a bookings component since customers already use the product. In contrast, sales-led interactions take place up front and generally with larger enterprise prospects. Consumption usually begins after a contract is negotiated and often after a migration takes place, which means compensation should include a consumption component. CHAMPION GUIDES