I hope you don’t think a base salary for salespeople is merely a kind act on your part to help your new hire through until they hit stride. And as altruistic as you are, I hope that it isn’t merely a way to alleviate your concern that your new hire would have no motivation at all without some sort of salary. Good points. However, so many CEO’s waste the opportunity to use a base salary as a way to gain momentum for their new hire.

By now I hope you know your metrics – you know, how many dials to contact, contacts to appointment, appointments to close, etc. For a new sales hire, the most important thing you should be concerned about for the first 90 days is activity – i.e. how many dials, or door knocks, or networking events, etc. And because you’re paying a base salary, you need to leverage your kind act and tie it to their activity. You need to make it perfectly clear, up front, that their base salary is tied to a certain level of activity. 90% of your activity = 90% of base. Any problems?

Use the base salary for all it’s worth! Eventually your new hire will run into sales. And because you’re tracking the activity (see “You’re using Track-It sheets, right?!“), you’ll start to see patterns where they need improvement and the areas where they can be trained.