A major concern among most people in sales positions is that they make as much money as they can. While this is great for free-wheeling sales people who can just hustle harder when they want to make ends meet, this doesn’t cut it at the corporate level. For someone in a position where they have to make the difficult decisions, there’s a lot more at stake than just paying the rent.
If you’re running any group larger than yourself, you have to create not only an earning plan but a spending plan. This is not the same as a budget, either. A budget is typically concerned only with keeping things going the way they’ve been in the past. It’s a look at the past with only the most casual glance toward the future. A spending plan, on the other hand, is a look as deeply into the future as you can get with both eyes focused on making as much happen as possible.
When you focus on the future, you need to concern yourself with a lot of variables. For one thing, you need to fairly compensate your people, without just resorting to ever-increasing cash payments. You also have to keep an eye for your expenses, so in case things get bad you’ll have a fund set aside to keep every bill paid and everyone compensated during the worst of times. When things get bad your spending plan has got to hold water just as well as it does during the best of times.