Developing Sales Compensation

Music Gerhard Gschwandtner: Hi, my name is Gerhard Gschwandtner, and welcome to Selling Power TV. Today we have the pleasure of meeting with Liz Cobb. She is the Founder and CEO of Makana Solutions. Welcome, Liz. Liz Cobb: Thank you. It's my pleasure to be here. Gerhard Gschwandtner: I hear you're from Little Rock, Arkansas. Liz Cobb: I am. I grew up there. I've been in Boston for about 25 years, but I spent all of my childhood in Little Rock. Gerhard Gschwandtner: And you have founded three companies, now. Liz Cobb: I have. This is my third. I love the start-up. Gerhard Gschwandtner: Tell me, Liz, where did you get the entrepreneurial instinct? How did -- how does that develop? Liz Cobb: Well, it was really ever-present in my household because my father often worked with entrepreneurs. In fact, there was a time when Colonel Sanders came to our house, and I was only a lowly fifth grader, but I remember him quite well with the goatee and the whole thing. And it was before he had taken the company public, and my dad was working with him on that. So I got to see the before and the after. And it was very exciting. Gerhard Gschwandtner: And that's where you're dreams formed, of becoming an entrepreneur? Liz Cobb: I always thought that it would be so much fun to have an idea, and see it come out into fruition, and actually help people change their lives in some way or another. Gerhard Gschwandtner: When did you start your first company? Liz Cobb: Started my first company in 1991. Had a couple of other co-founders, and in that experience, we actually found this wide open business problem of people struggling to manage their sales compensation. My second company I started was in '96 or '97. And there, we actually came up with a great software solution to help improve the accuracy of commission payments and provide good feedback. And in that experience, I ultimately learned that companies really had other problems they were struggling with. They were struggling with coming up the right compensation plan in the first place. So in founding Makana, my founding vision really is about helping companies create the best compensation program so they can take costs out of the sales organization and put efficiencies into the sales incentive plans. And we do that by providing a Google Maps of their sales compensation plans. So they can finally get a macro level view of what these plans look like. So you can zoom out, as if you're looking at it from a satellite, and see how all the plans work together, the teams will work together, or not. You want to eliminate the ones that don't work together. And then you can drill down into the detail that you need in order to understand any nuances. So we give you that zoom in/zoom out capability in the compensation plans. Gerhard Gschwandtner: Now, what is the biggest challenge for an entrepreneur to start a new business and do it three times in a row? Is it the business idea, or is it getting the financing or getting the right people in place? Liz Cobb: One of the biggest things is to have a real strong vision of how you will help companies or people. It's the customers that matter in the end. And having that strong vision, along with persistence and fortitude because you're trying new things all the time. So you need to innovate, create, test, and get feedback. Financing is a key piece of it, so having -- you know, working with investors and finding the right investors in order to support the growth of the business is really key. It's very exciting to take something from just an idea to actually see the customer say, "Wow, I improved my sales 15 percent the first month I used your product." Gerhard Gschwandtner: So it seems to me that you are obsessed and driven by helping other companies take inefficiencies out of their compensation plans and putting it -- giving them back a tool that helps them run their company more effectively. Liz Cobb: Absolutely. You know, I love helping companies make their teams work together. One of the unintended consequences I've seen in bad incentive plans is that teams can often work against each other instead of with each other. And it's because their plans might have been developed in silos by different parts of the organization, and no one can get a view into how they work together. Gerhard Gschwandtner: So you are creating clarity and visibility for the company. Let's continue our conversation tomorrow. Tune in when Liz Cobb is going to share with us the Makana Solution, and how it can transform your compensation landscape.

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