Thriving in Turbulence: How Smarter Sales Strategies Can Stabilize Your Business

Today’s challenging business landscape, shaped by global tariffs and geopolitical responses, has thrown a wrench into traditional business planning. These tariffs drive up costs across industries, threatening continuity and growth by creating key go-to-market (GTM) pain points. If businesses cannot effectively plan for their futures and adapt to these shifts, they risk widespread inefficiencies and waste at scale. Navigating uncertainty is currently the top challenge for 47% of businesses.

It’s not just the tariffs themselves but the surrounding volatility that makes the landscape so challenging. The tariff rollout has been marked by policy changes, reversals, and plenty of confusion, leading to chaotic market conditions. This environment necessitates quick adaptation to minimize decline and capitalize on opportunities. While typical responses to cost-intensive environments include raising prices or eliminating redundancies, the current landscape demands a novel approach.

What many business leaders might not expect is how their sales compensation strategies can directly influence their organization’s ability to withstand periods of disruption. Strategic compensation design can smooth speed bumps and ensure your business remains competitive.

Retain Top Sales Talent Through Competitive Compensation

During turbulent periods, the last thing organizations need is to scramble to fill hiring gaps. Any shortcomings in headcount translate directly to lost productivity and missed opportunities. In times of heightened uncertainty, people have a natural tendency to “wait it out” – sometimes leading them to a “freeze” response rather than active movement. This means there could be a significant amount of high-performing talent latently (but not actively) looking for a job. 

Sales and business development teams are the front line of customer relationships, and they must be supported to ensure the organization can maintain its invaluable relationships with prospects and current customers. As these teams survey the business landscape and contemplate their future with a firm, their primary consideration will be compensation. Compensation is the number one reason people take (59%) and leave (48%) jobs.

For leaders, this underscores the critical need to ensure that their organizations’ sales compensation plans remain highly attractive. Implementing targeted recruiting and upgrading top performers in key roles can also significantly enhance retention. Retaining employees is significantly more cost-effective than the entire process of attracting, vetting, hiring, and onboarding new ones.

Beyond financial incentives, teams also seek competitive benefits, professional development opportunities, and executive encouragement (and modeling) of work/life balance. Efficient GTM investment approaches are crucial for maintaining broad communication with customers during uncertain times.

Optimize Sales Incentives for Performance and Agility

Due to the volatility, businesses should aim to stay the course wherever possible: continuing to fulfill orders, serve customers, and nurture leads. To keep teams motivated, leaders must strategically reassess their pay-for-performance programs. It’s always expected that employees perform their core job functions to the best of their abilities, but this landscape is challenging for everyone, making incentive pay a highly effective tool for encouraging peak productivity. The goal is to design compensation plans that are performance-driven and dynamic, enabling agility as market conditions shift.

To future-proof compensation, employ shorter performance periods (quarterly, monthly, etc.) to allow for quicker adjustments and mitigate the impact of uncontrollable factors with extreme influence on pay. Incorporating team-based metrics can also mitigate outsized impacts on individual sellers, fostering collaboration in uncertain times. Finally, maintaining transparency by providing clear communication to the commercial team, being honest about challenges, and sharing guiding principles is crucial.

Leverage Strategic Investments (e.g., AI) for Sales Advantage

Counterintuitively, periods of business disruption can be optimal times for strategic investments for the future. Rather than waiting an indeterminate period for conditions to stabilize – which may never fully occur – effective leaders proactively invest in tools that enhance team efficiency and productivity. The current landscape exposes areas where businesses can “do more with less” and accelerate the shift toward greater digital engagement. This includes implementing real-time reporting and management cadence and reevaluating the effectiveness of digital tools that previously had limited use.

AI is a prime example of such a tool. If leaders haven’t yet embraced it as a value-add for their sales teams, now is the time. Advanced, AI-powered analytics tools ingest both internal and external variables to help sales teams develop models for targeting, territories, and quotas – ensuring decisions are data-forward rather than reliant on guesswork. Nearly three-quarters (71%) of organizations have either implemented or plan to implement AI for sales compensation, with the most prevalent applications being analytics and reporting, cost modeling, and quota setting.​ Machine learning can continuously monitor and adapt to shifting customer preferences, which is vital during periods of volatility. This rigorous forecasting helps monitor revenue impact and creates an “all hands on deck” approach to key opportunities. 

It’s All About Value

When costs are rising, businesses need to double down on showcasing their ability to add value to customers’ lives. To do this, leaders must ensure their teams are operating at their very best. This means retaining top talent, encouraging maximum productivity through strategically designed compensation plans, and embracing advanced tools that drive efficiency. By adopting a performance-driven, dynamic, and transparent sales compensation strategy, leaders can set their teams up for success and ensure their business remains competitive in our current period of volatility and beyond.

Matt Bartels is a partner at Alexander Group.