I read “Sales Comp Demands a Deep Sales Dive, Not a Best Practices Quest” by Ann Bares on Compensation Force yesterday – the article really resonated with me. The basic premise of the article is that companies should focus on understanding their sales force and not depend on best practices. Ann states it best when she says, “the problem with the notion of best practices in HR is that it too often leads to a blind search-copy-cut-paste effort whereby we simply lift popular program elements (out of professional journals, books, studies, etc.) and implement them, without sufficient thought as to their fit and strategic applicability.”
It resonated because it is right-on but also because I just completed an assignment for a company where they were looking for “best practices.”
I didn’t give them any (we’ll not really – more on that later…).
In previous blog articles we have discussed the 