When it comes to ensuring that your digital marketing sales team is firing on all cylinders, chances are that you’ll be looking to take a proactive approach. All too often, we assume that teams working on commission based pay structures have all the incentive they need to reach targets. However, it’s essential to keep on top of many varying factors that are motivating your sales team.

Digital marketing sales teams can be negatively impacted by a wide range of issues within their wider working environment – from the wrong behaviours being unwittingly incentivized, to issues with high staff turnover impacting motivation and the establishment of company culture.

In this article, we’ll explore five dependable ways to boost your marketing sales agents’ motivation, increasing their engagement and boosting ongoing loyalty. It’s a win-win situation for all involved – with your agents’ earned commission, your clients’ success and your ongoing agency development all experiencing a healthy upward trajectory.

1. Consider Your Commission Structure

First and foremost – consider your commission structure. While this isn’t the only factor motivating your sales team, it’s undoubtedly one of the most important.

Take a critical look at your current marketing sales commission structure and the behaviours that it is encouraging. Are these in true alignment with the long term success of your agency, client stratification and your company values? 

A well considered commission structure has the ability to apply much more nuance to the way your team is compensated. If you’re processing a lot of multistage deals, or deals with more than one agent involved over time, it’s important to ensure that everyone feels fairly compensated for their role – and that they’re being renumbered in a timely fashion. When it comes to the way that commission can be earnt, if you lack the ability to offer true clarity, you risk a demotivated team that’s lacking the incentive to work together collaboratively.

A key component of success here is access to software that can help to help manage complex, individual commission plans – or even multiple plans applying to one agent across the range of clients that they work with.

Commissionly features that you might find helpful when it comes to your marketing sales commission structure include variable time frames, commissions calculated based on customer (i.e. via matrices), multistage commissions and rates which cascade, reducing over time as a client is retained.

2. Give Better Transparency And Autonomy

If you’re looking for a high performing digital marketing sales team, you’ll want to ensure you’re  giving your agents complete clarity – in terms of expectation and targets, but also in relation to where they sit within their earnings and expected compensation. Commission plans might (by necessity) be fairly complex – especially if they’re in a constant state of flux, or if old and new schemes are running concurrently.

As a result, it’s of paramount importance to make sure you’re running a system that gives them easy access to all of the information they might need access to regarding their commission rates, bonuses and ongoing retainers. After all – you’d rather they were out selling than scratching their heads and trying to work out how profitable their next deal might be.

Solutions like Commissioned can give better access to and understanding of the current state of play when it comes to expectations and remuneration. This does more than increase the motivation of your sales team – it also reduces the burden on your billing personnel, who won’t have to field as many requests and questions.

3. Seek Feedback (And Take Real Action Based Upon It!)

Listening and responding to actual feedback is an essential contributing factor to a sales team that stays motivated in the long term. It’s all too easy to fall into the trap of making assumptions on the part of your marketing agents – believing you have an idea of exactly what’s making them tick. However, in the absence of encouraging real feedback, you can find yourself lurching from short-term incentive to short-term incentive, with no real strategy for ongoing engagement and improving performance.

Scheduling a regular cadence for feedback and addressing the way that staff satisfaction is measured can have a transformative effect. Remember, hitting sales targets is not necessarily equal to agents feeling fulfilled and happy within their roles. Learn more about their other motivators, such as career development or the chance to mentor.

4. Set Clear (And Fair) Targets 

Take time to develop dependable methods of generating targets that will be challenging but achievable. This will vary so much from agency to agency – and again, a huge contributing factor to success will be the two way communication you encourage from your team via regular feedback. 

Carefully consider the pros and cons of stretch goals and bonuses – again, are these encouraging the long term behaviours and attitudes that you’d like to see from your agents? Think about other ways you can define success – reward agents on client anniversaries, package upgrades, for bringing past clients back to the business etc. 

Commissionly offers a real edge here, integrating with a wide range of CRMs, helping you connect the dots between client progression and your agents’ input. To learn a little more about what this might look like in practice, read our recent article, The Future Of RevOps For Digital Marketing Agencies. With Comissionly’s platform you’re also able to easily implement override commission, meaning all levels of your team can see clear compensation for their involvement.

5. Create A Culture Of Retention 

Finally, don’t underestimate the impact of placing focus on retention rather than acquisition of new agents. What keeps your sales team loyal? On balance, are you spending more time recruiting to fill positions, or investing effort into the success and culture of your existing team?

A retained team benefits your business and clients in so many ways. You’re able to offer and rely upon more in-house knowledge Resources invested in training are preserved. Your whole team has a collective working knowledge of client needs, and the way that they’ve evolved over time. 

This kind of culture serves your agents too – providing a more stable working environment, better leadership and role models, and more scope for internal training, to name just a few benefits. Remember, as your retained workforce evolves, you’ll need to be willing to evolve your marketing sales commission structure alongside them.

Ready For A More Motivated Digital Marketing Sales Team?

When it comes to laying the foundations for long term success, place focus beyond the top level metrics that typically define a successful marketing sales team, and instead assess the underlying factors that are driving the outcomes achieved by your digital marketing agency.

Commission structure and the management of your commission scheme lies at the heart of this – and having access to software that does the heavy lifting when it comes to delivering and automating commission plans that are (necessarily) complex, can be a real gamechanger.

Struggling with your digital marketing agency commission?

Avoiding Costly Commission Issues – A Guide For Marketing Agencies

RevOps within digital marketing is on the rise – rapidly becoming an established norm when it comes to internal operational management. What exactly is meant by RevOps? A contraction of “Revenue Optimisation” this term refers to an operational model designed to ensure that a business’s capacity for revenue generation is maximized. As ever, our integration partner HubSpot has some excellent resources to help you learn more about this model.

A RevOps approach seeks to instill full cooperative alignment between alignment of marketing, sales, and customer service teams. Rather than operating in isolation, before passing off a lead or established customer to the care of a separate team acting in isolation, a “flywheel” model is established. All teams work in closer collaboration, with a focus on end-to-end customer experience, seamless workflows and integrated systems. This removes friction and supercharges a business’s ability to scale.

In the case of digital marketing agencies, the benefits of an active RevOps strategy are twofold – better internal agency collaboration and outcomes, at the same time as improving client satisfaction and success. Within this article, we’ll outline some of the ways in which RevOps looks set to improve the landscape for digital marketing agencies today, and in the years to come.

RevOps For Digital Marketing Agency Internal Alignment 

RevOps can be implemented to help to bring a digital marketing agency into better internal alignment. Within the traditional RevOps model, accountability stops becoming a siloed practice. Instead, your account managers and support team gain better “full picture” insight into client success, measured across a wider range of metrics and markers.

The cyclical RevOps model means that this improved insight feeds back into sharper, more accurate marketing recommendations for clients. In turn, this helps to build up a more holistic understanding of the way that different agency teams collaborate and depend on each other’s outcomes.

For example, marketing team members learn about common pain points and blockers from the sales team, and are able to incorporate this into their own planning going forward.

Improved Digital Marketing Sales Attribution 

Knowing exactly where your success is coming from is essential within the setting of a digital marketing agency. By helping bring clarity to a dynamic process that relies upon the input of many different teams and individuals, RevOps can help improve attribution when it comes to sales success.

Everyone working towards your clients’ success will have a better idea of what’s working in the context of “the bigger picture.” This does more than simply helping you work out more productive, collaborative workflows – it can also have a really positive impact upon  team cohesion and motivation.

Digital marketing agencies are always on the lookout for ways to improve their marketing sales commission structure – by making it more efficient, more commercially appealing – or, most probably, all of the above! By adopting a RevOps model, you can apply the deeper insight gained into the roles that everyone played towards a closed deal, and translate this into a fairer compensation structure.

Multistage commission is a great way of ensuring that everyone involved in a deal is getting fair payment for their contribution, in a timely fashion. Commissionly’s multistage commission feature enables you to pay commissions at different stages of your sales and delivery process to different payees – keeping your teams motivated with well-timed, fair compensation for their input.

Enhanced Client Experiences 

The RevOps model is increasingly commonplace across a wide variety of client or customer based businesses. As a result, by adopting these principals internally, you’ll be able to “speak the same language” as your clients, who are more than likely very familiar with the benefits of such a model, and putting them into practice within their own businesses.

This helps to build trust and increase the likelihood of cross selling and upselling, as you gain a better understanding of their pain points and business models – and, perhaps most importantly, see how your input as an agency sits within their wider business model. An active RevOps strategy also helps to demonstrate your interest and commitment to your clients’ end results, through better account expansion and improved customer-focused campaigns.

Once established, a RevOps model just gets better over time. Thanks to its cyclical “flywheel” structure, improvements feed back into the start of the process. Client experience is improved in a way that is consistently demonstrated over time – no quick fixes or emergency measures – just a great, holistic agency experience.

Eliminated Tech Silos 

The smart leverage of data is essential to success within a digital marketing agency environment. With the rise of MarTech, this is becoming increasingly essential, as a wide variety of tools give us insight into our campaign and client success metrics.

By combining marketing and customer success data, RevOps enables you to see which campaigns are resonating at the same time as highlighting the elements of your marketing mix that are having the greatest impact in terms of the outcomes clients are looking for.

As an agency, you can leverage this insight to improve post-purchase marketing experiences (i.e. offering your clients more than just lead generation or traffic.) Data can be put to use shortening purchase cycles and accelerating sales. Commissionly is a great example of a solution that can help to power a strong RevOps strategy, allowing easy integration with a huge range of CRMs to ensure that you’re able to easily join the dots between client success and team commissions.

Improved Agency Success Metrics

Finally, let’s not forget the tangible lift that RevOps can bring to a business in terms of success metrics. In 2020, the Boston Consulting Group found that B2B companies implementing RevOps accelerated their revenue growth and operations efficiency with a

• 100% – 200% increase in digital marketing ROI
• 10% – 20% increase in sales productivity
• 10% increase in lead acceptance
• 15% – 20% increase in customer satisfaction
• 30% reduction in expenses

This is especially important and relevant within a digital marketing agency context, where businesses are typically looking for long-term, steady accounts that are retained with minimal effort, allowing for customer relationships that continue to grow and strengthen over time.

RevOps For Digital Marketing Agencies: Get Ahead

RevOps represents a real opportunity for digital marketing agencies to improve outcomes and streamline their internal processes. More effective interdepartmental communication leads to better collaboration and attribution of success.

By pairing a solution like Commissionly alongside the RevOps approach, you can ensure that all effort is appropriately rewarded, showing your respect and appreciation for multiple agency teams, pulling together to help bring your business great results.

With a focus on streamlining customer experience, and allowing for better personalisation at every stage of their journey, it’s no surprise that RevOps is increasingly being heralded as the secret to account-based business success. Digital marketing agencies have so much to gain from his model – especially when it comes to marketing sales commission structure, and motivating a commission-based workforce to see the bigger picture within an agency environment.  

Looking to kick sales up a gear? 5 Tips For A Highly Motivated Marketing Sales Team – See our next blog …

In this article, we’ll explore five of the key issues that can commonly occur when it comes to the effective management of payment processing commissions – and suggest a few easy fixes that you might like to consider implementing.

1. Failure To Automate 

There’s a reason that automation tools have dominated within the world of SaaS for the last decade. Extending your capacity in the most reliable and seamless way, automation boosts your bottom line twice: once as it improves your efficiency and again with the reduction you can expect to see in errors.

The transactional world of payment processing and merchant services is a particularly data heavy industry. Working manually with spreadsheets is one solution – but this approach can only scale so far, and ultimately, is going to end up hampering your ability to grow (as well as frustrating your staff and carrying the potential to eat into huge amounts of their time and capacity.)

With so many inputting factors coming into play (especially with multiple payment processors involved) the risk of human error is also fairly significant – and has the potential to be costly. Automation helps solve these problems, leveraging AI and machine learning to provide a truly dependable tracking and management system. Within the realm of commission, it enables you to create workflows that are a match for growing future ambitions.

In the case of Commissionly, imported transactional data will automatically map your agents to the customers MID number, Name or Code. This alone can save untold hours of manual effort. Similarly, in the case of your transaction report commissions, any splits that are required between agents can be set up and handled automatically – reducing the margin for error and giving your team one less process to factor into their individual workflows.

2. Missed Opportunities To Gain Insight From Data 

As previously mentioned, the payment processing and merchant services sector is a data-heavy space, and this can be framed as a challenge to be mitigated – or as an untapped benefit, ready for careful leverage. The sheer amount of information generated by the actions of your agents unlocks the opportunity for deep, actionable insight and ongoing operational efficiencies.

In order to fully capitalize on this valuable stream of data, you’ll need a way to generate clear reports that can highlight areas of potential and flag up issues that require attention  or improvement. Commissionly helps make this process simple, connecting directly to your CRM or a sales platform via a wide range of integrations, including Salesforce, Hubspot, Monday and Zapier. You can also sync to any system leveraging Rest APIs. The outcome? Clarity and control over your data – showing you the next best step, via custom reporting.

3. Ineffective Data Import 

When it comes to mapping and recording transaction commissions (as well as recording additional data points such as terminal sales) one necessity really stands out: flexibility at scale. Business models are unique, and likely in ongoing states of evolution and flux. As a result, transaction reports need the ability to accurately accommodate a wider range of data points. Reports should also be easy to customize, amend and reconfigure.

Within the realm of payment processing, a solution that enables you to easily track and attribute data points such as customer MID numbers, Names or Codes. This is where flexible, customer templating comes into its own. Commissionly offers the ability to structure your pay terminal commissions based on any combination of terminal type, monthly charge, contract length add ons and more.

4. Inefficient Clawback Processes 

Claw back is a necessary evil, and while it’s something we all hope to minimise the need for, the importance of an effective claw back process if a merchant does churn cannot be overstated. Once again, the key word here is scale – as your number of operational agents grows, your ability to keep track of this process with any degree of efficiency or accuracy diminishes.

Improvements to your clawback procedure is about more than just ensuring your own operational efficiency and profitability – it can also play a key role in keeping your agents motivated and informed. Having a dedicated solution in place here plays a role in helping your business attain wider transparency in this field. Additionally, there are clear benefits to having an automated clawback process that syncs into wider reporting.

5. Poor Communication Of Progress And Targets To Agents

We’ve previously touched on transparency, but it should be stressed that the benefits here go beyond the realm of clawbacks. There are big benefits linked to better communication of progress and targets more broadly.

Beyond this, if many other previously time-consuming areas of commission tracking, attribution  and management have been automated and optimized, the time won back can be reinvested into the training, guidance and assistance of agents. This additional contact and education can be optimized via the clarity brought by better reporting and more clearly illuminated trends.

One outcome of working with a dedicated commission management solution such as Commissionly is the ability to set realistic expectations of progression. Forecasted targets can be used to help motivate and (crucially) retain your agents – a big factor in their ongoing loyalty and success with you! Success here means a reduction in your ongoing acquisition costs, and a more experienced and effective agent base.

Side Step Common Payment Processing Commission Issues

As this article has shown, the payments processing industry is plagued by a small handful of 

Common (but persistent) commissioning headaches. By taking action to remedy these problems and apply a long term solution, some significant advantages can be unlocked – unlocking optimized procedures, more internal efficiencies, boosted revenues and valuable insight into ongoing operational performance.

A few tweaks to your operations within the realm of payment processing commission have the impact to send positive, profitable ripples across all levels of your business. With a vertical specialism in the payment processing commissions sector,  Commissionly represents the ideal solution for delivering these changes – bringing benefits that extend far beyond your commissioning departments, via increased efficiency, improved forecasting and data-backed decision making.