How the Right MLM Commission Software Can Help You Avoid Paying Twice
What would you do if tomorrow morning, a nationally-known blogger with 1.2 million followers posted a glowing review of one of your products and provided a link to the product page on your website?
Like any direct sales professional, you’d rejoice—for a little while. But soon, reality would set in.
Sure, your sales totals would probably skyrocket. But then you would start to get voicemails from your sales reps.
“Hey, I heard about the article—great news! I was just wondering….am I going to see any commissions on the sales in my city? I mean, I’ve spent the last 10 years blanketing our town with information about our products. Shouldn’t I see some reward from these sales that are coming in?”
How do you respond to that? Your sales rep has put you in a classic catch-22.
You can either say, “Sorry, no commission for you. You didn’t make these sales.” This would be the most economical approach for your company. It would also be tantamount to saying, “Your 10 years of footwork aren’t really that valuable to us.”
Or you could say, “Sure, we’ll give you your regular commission.” But then you would be giving a sales rep the same reward as if they had initiated contact, scheduled meetings, made product presentations, followed up, and closed the deal with each of these new customers. And the truth is, they didn’t. So, this option doesn’t feel right, either.
There is a way to address this increasingly common conundrum. If you have the right MLM commission software, you can actually take a middle road that attracts more coverage from social media giants while keeping your sales reps happy.
Why Your Sales Reps Have a Good Point
You’ve made a tremendous investment in your field of sales reps. You’ve recruited them, trained them, paid them commissions, motivated them with incentive promotions, and made every reasonable attempt to keep them on board.
And so when a social media personality comes along and writes an article that generates hundreds of new sales for you in just minutes, it’s tempting to think, “Who needs a salesforce when you have the bloggers on your side?”
But as you’ve certainly noticed, bloggers come and go. Your sales reps—the best ones, at least—are in this for the long haul. Although overall attrition rates are still far higher than any of us would like, a sales rep who will stay with your company for five or 10 years is worth her weight in gold.
That’s why we have to take comments from sales reps who feel jilted seriously when hundreds of people in their territory buy your products based on the recommendation of some social media influencer. It’s not hard to understand their frustration—after all, they’ve probably done much to build awareness of your products in their area. Perhaps the blog article was simply the final “touch” needed to convince them to buy.
In the interest of keeping everyone happy, then, it behooves you to come up with some way of compensating your sales reps for these sales. But don’t forget about the bloggers, who will also want to see a cut of the action. Using the right MLM commission software will help.
Solution: Offer Dedicated Coupons Backed by Your MLM Commission Software
Here’s our suggestion for sales made as a result of social media posts: use dedicated coupons.
It works like this: you give social media influencers a special discount code containing identification detail that’s unique to them. The Social Influencer directs followers to a special website and advises them to use the special code to get some advantages like a discount or other product promotion. Any time a sale is made using that special code, the influencer will get a percentage of the commission calculated by your MLM commission software.
This link will lead customers to your corporate shopping page where your lead distribution rules can route the sale to the specific sales rep who should earn credit for the sale. This rep will get their usual commission, minus the amount paid out to the social influencer.
In this model, the social influencer has incentive to promote your products. The sales rep gets a flurry of new sales without any extra footwork. The discount code also allows the sales rep to promote the social influencer in their own networks and publish the discount code with a purchase link back to their own shopping site — guaranteeing that the commission will come their way rather than going back through corporate lead distribution.
The key to all of this is that you’re using MLM commission software that supports it. If your system doesn’t support commission sharing or affiliate / influencer models, you may end up paying out commissions twice just to stave off a mutiny! But with Thatcher’s Prowess platform, you can use social media influencers and affiliates to your advantage.
Learn about our MLM commission software.