What is the biggest stimulus to a sales person apart from winning an order? The answer is the financial reward in winning the order, the commission.
Many commission schemes are designed around order intake, revenue recognition, and margin. These are further extended to cover market sectors, customers, products, and new to existing customers ratio, to name but a few.
Yet one of the biggest problems many companies face is that of order slippage, when an order is forecasted for a certain time but does not happen. One mechanism could be the commission scheme. It can be used to drive the sales person to forecast the order date more accurately based on facts gained from the client. Part of the commission scheme could be to reward the sales person on maintaining a certain level of order forecast date accuracy. This could be subdivided into levels of performance, say 80% accuracy and then at 90% accuracy. It could be one component that makes up the commission for winning an order.
The order forecast date is driven by the client's internal factors and therefore the sales person might not be party to all the information. The purpose of setting up a commission scheme that takes into account order forecast date is to focus the mind of the sales person to find out what is the compelling event that drives the order forecast date.
Incentivise the sales person by treating this as an add-on to the main part of the commission and it should assist in getting greater sales forecasting accuracy.