How much should I pay a home care marketer?
The base pay for a home care marketer could be as low as $50,000 because ideally, a significant portion of their compensation should come from bonuses for growth (more on that later). A best practice for determining an appropriate base salary is to stay in tune with your market.
If you have a smaller organization and budget is tight, yet you’re ready for more community outreach, you don’t need to let budget be a show-stopper for you. Find someone with potential, but not necessarily years of experience, and train them yourself.
Quality sales training and coaching resources are available to help develop your marketer’s skills and execute a sales plan. If a person has the right personality, resilience, a strong work ethic, and an understanding of the players, they can learn to implement effective B2B sales strategies.
Now, let’s talk about bonuses to round out a compensation plan for your marketer. It’s critical to ensure that metrics used for bonuses are tied to the agency’s year-over-year increase in profit. That’s because a reward system based on individual metrics, such as new client intakes or total hours increased, has potential to bring in unqualified leads at lower rates, which can actually erode your bottom line.
Let’s explore some goal-driven approaches to a compensation plan:
- Base salary $40K to $70K, or 2.0% to 3.5% of annual revenue.
- Incentive 0.3 to 0.6% of revenue ($6K to 10K for a $2M agency).
- Pay the incentive on the difference between the actual quarterly revenue and the prior year’s annualized revenue per quarter. Consider splitting 5% to 7% of this amount across multiple team members with roles that are highly influential on financial outcomes.
- Commission is typically paid quarterly. Monthly commission plans are common and effective, however doing so creates a greater administrative burden and fails to absorb the natural ebb and flow that is expected in home care.
- An optional end-of-year bonus based on year-over-year growth can help push momentum into the next year; consider if 2% of growth may fit within the budget.
- The most experienced marketers may expect for 25%-40% of their total compensation to be paid in commission and bonuses, which can be highly motivating and is worth consideration. This approach works best if your team can staff shifts very reliably, with minimal missed visits. This model comes with an increased risk for turnover when scheduling challenges interfere with the marketer’s measured results. (Hence, why we emphasize team goals, rather than individual goals.)
- Add qualifiers, which may be the following:
- Minimum sales calls per week, such as 32-40 for a full-time marketer
- Minimum number of active sales accounts to maintain
- CRM utilization requirement
A best practice for the marketer, and all team members with a high level of influence on the bottom line, is to compensate generously for increases in net profit. In this way, the team will harmoniously work together towards a common goal.
Of course, each organization is uniquely positioned and it’s important to explore all sides of each possible solution. Evaluate your priorities, goals, and your local market. Use the above indicators as suggestions as you analyze your unique situation.
To learn more about persuasion and strategies to empower each team member to build fruitful relationships in the home care industry, check out this blog.