Over the past few weeks, we’ve talked about rewarding the right jobs in the right way.

From our webinar with the Chally Group to this blog series with quick incenting tips for different roles, we want to help you provide sales compensation that gets results.  (Check out what I had to say about incenting hunters and rewarding farmers over the past two weeks. If you are an SMB looking to access best practices, check out our new plan store for companies just like yours.)

Today, we are going to tackle a different kind of sales role, one often over looked but extremely important, pre-sales support.

These are the sales team members who support sales reps by providing the deep product knowledge and demonstration expertise needed to close the deal.

This role is too important to the team to just make a partial mirror of the sales rep plan.  The plan needs to reflect the different role these specialists have.

As the demo artist, the staff in this role must not only understand the technical side of the product as well as any engineer, they must also be able to present in a manner as engaging as any sales person.  They then have to take that same knowledge base and communication ability to craft the RFP response, and to help defuse the landmines that your competitors have placed in your way.

Because their efforts can help make – or break – a deal, they deserve rewards that compensate their efforts. They deserve inclusion in your incentive compensation program – there are some companies that don’t provide ANY variable payout for these team members!

When considering how to reward these team members, also remember that while they have an impact, they are not the closer/hunters on the deal. That means they do not have final control over a deal’s success and thus should have a smaller percentage of their total pay package in variable incentives.

For example, if your hunter’s pay mix includes a 40 percent variable piece, consider rewarding the specialists, as pre-sales support is sometimes known, with a 20 or 30 percent variable pay piece.

Also, because they are working with an entire team, a specialist’s quota needs to be based on the entire team’s success. Add up any revenue or unit goals for the whole team. That should be specialist’s primary quota.

You can also consider extra incentives that recognize specialists who provide equal support to their entire team rather than focusing on one particularly profitable rep or for including a particular product mix in demos.

How do you support these important team players?