It’s officially summer and just past the half-way point of 2015.  I’m curious:

• How are you doing as it relates to your achieving your personal and/or professional goals for 2015?
• Will 2015 be a good year, a poor year or an average year as it relates to your income?

To ensure that 2015 ends up being a good year please allow me to walk you through a process called a Compensation Planner.

Sit down with your laptop (or a pad and pencil if that makes you more comfortable) and write down how much you want to earn in 2015.  Be specific (e.g.; $100,000). Then assuming that you will earn what you wrote down  make a note of what that income will allow you to do (or buy) if you were to earn it (i.e., buy a new house, get married, have kids, pay off a school loan, etc.).  The next step in the process is to subtract your salary from the number you wrote down.  We’ll call the delta your variable compensation target.  Next identify how many deals (and the size of the deals) you need to sell in 2015 to be paid the commissions to reach your variable compensation target.  Next, calculate where you are year-to-date as it relates to your variable compensation target.  Then, put together an action plan to achieve your variable compensation target over the next six months.  Be sure to include specific action steps you’re going to take, what you need from your manager and/or your company and when you’re going to complete each step.  In addition, establish key priorities by month, milestones and a contingency plan should any of the key milestones fall short.  Selected action steps could include:

• Increase the amount of time spent on prospecting/business development activities by one hour/day
• Increase the number of qualified prospects in your pipeline by 20% in the next 60-days
• Improve your close rate by 5% over the next 30-days
• Increase your share of wallet with existing customers by 10% in the next 60-days
• Generate one referral a week from existing customers
• Increase your average order size by 10% effective immediately
• Shrink your sales cycle by 15 days over the next two months
• “Win back” two former customer by the end of the year
• Diversify the type of account and size of account in your pipeline
• Close one significant competitive take-away account between now and the end of the year