“Trust” is a crucial element for customers and employees - Gautam Chainani, Chief People Officer, Aditya Birla Financial Services.

From my experience, to build a successful sales team, companies need to focus on hiring the highest relevant profile basis competency mapping. Hiring is a big challenge for these industries as talent is scarce. Once the person joins the organization, the initial days are crucial to ensure that the environment to succeed is set for the individual. In this phase ‘over management’ is required until the person stabilizes in the job. Management style then needs to follow an ongoing inspirational leadership backed by a strong performance culture across levels. Performance needs to be linked to pay and rewards, and companies must be able to strike a smart balance between fixed and variable pay. Finally, investment in strong capability development programs is important through the complete life cycle of a sales person.

Insurance industry in India (unlike elsewhere) has frontline sales team that draws mostly a fixed salary, even though the trend is changing towards increasing the variable component. Reinforcing the right behavior around trust and integrity in a sales process is the hallmark of a well designed incentive plan. As the nature of business revolves around ‘trust’, the power of the brand matters to a significant extent for both consumers and employees, so companies need to invest significantly in brand building activities, externally and internally.