Homework: Sales Compensation

Homework: Sales Compensation
 
 
You are the manager of the Sales Department for the Epic Widget Manufacturing Company. The company produces three different types of widgets: small widgets, medium widgets, and large widgets.
 
The senior management of your company has forecasted sales and has asked you and your sales team to sell the following quantities of products during the upcoming fiscal year:
 
QTY    PRODUCT                          PRICE PER UNIT
100     Large Widgets                    $45,000
150     Medium Widgets                 $35,000
225     Small Widgets                    $10,000
 
You must sell these quantities of widgets. Since you are the Sales Manager and not in charge of production, you do not control the production levels of the widgets.
 
Senior management is willing to spend up to, but not over, 10% of the company’s total sales on sales force compensation. This is the limit of total compensation available that you have to distribute to your sales team.
 
The sales force professionals in the sales department include:
 

• 3 Senior Sales Representatives
• 5 Sales Representatives
• 2 Sales Trainees

 
Assignment: Design a sales compensation plan for your department.
 
For each type of sales professional include plans for:

• Base salary
• Commission rate (constant, progressive, or regressive) for each type of product

1. Use the “Widgets” Excel spreadsheet from D2L (located just after this Homework assignment in the Content section) to develop a projection of sales numbers and sales compensation figures for each type of sales professional and for each type of product.
2. To complete the assignment, input your values into the blue-colored cells in the Widgets spreadsheet. Purple cells allow for optional entries for progressive or regressive commission plans.
3. The sales projections should satisfy the sales objectives and constraints given above.
4. Optional: you can explain your thinking and justification for your sales compensation plan in your spreadsheet starting in row 34.
5. You are allowed to work in small groups on this assignment, but each student must create their own original spreadsheet and submit it to their D2L dropbox by the due date. If you work in a small group (3 or less), be sure to include the names of the other students in your group when you submit the homework to the dropbox.