Golf Cart Salesperson Pay Plan: Commission, Salary and What Each One Rewards

A golf cart salesperson pay plan pays for the behavior you want repeated. Decide the behavior first: answer every lead fast, sell the aged unit, offer the payment and the service contract, get the review. Then pick the structure that rewards it, keep it to one page, and do not change it mid-season.

What is a golf cart salesperson pay plan really paying for?

It pays for whatever your salesperson does when you are not on the floor.

Picture a Tuesday in April, 4:50 p.m. You are out back with the parts delivery. Two messages come in ten minutes apart. One is on the new lifted six-seater up front. One is on the used four-seater that has sat by the fence since October.

Your salesperson answers the first one before his phone hits the desk. The second one waits until morning.

The plan pays him a share of the deal, and the six-seater is the bigger deal. Nobody wrote “ignore the used cart” on his pay sheet. The math wrote it.

So start with the behavior, not the structure. On a cart lot there are four worth paying for:

• Answer every lead fast. The cheap cart and the expensive one.
• Sell the aged unit. The cart that has been here longest.
• Offer the payment and the service contract. To every buyer, not only the ones who ask.
• Get the review. At delivery, by name. The ask is in golf cart dealer reviews strategy.

Pick the two or three your floor is not doing now. Who belongs on the floor comes before pay, and it is in hiring golf cart salespeople.

What does each pay structure reward and punish on a cart lot?

Eight pieces. Every golf cart sales commission plan is one of them, or a mix.

Straight salary. Say a slow month is four carts and a good month is fourteen. Made-up numbers. The check is the same both months. It rewards staying and the quiet work: cart photos, the delivery walk-around, the looker who buys next spring. It punishes nothing, so nothing says the Tuesday message matters.

A flat amount per cart. Every cart delivered pays the same, so the cart by the fence gets worked. It punishes holding price. The fastest way to one more cart is a discount, and the discount costs him nothing.

A share of the gross on the deal. It rewards holding price and selling the seat kit, the lift and the upgraded batteries. It punishes small deals. The cheap used cart pays him little, so it gets little.

Salary plus a bonus. A steady base, and a bonus at a count you set. It rewards a push when the count is close. Say the count is twelve carts and he is at five on the twentieth. Made up again. He coasts until the first.

A team pool. The floor shares one pot. It rewards covering the phone and helping load the trailer. It punishes your best closer, who carries the pool and knows it.

A kicker for aged units. Extra for any cart past a set number of days on the lot. It works if the list is short and posted. If every cart is on the list, it is just a raise.

A piece of the backend. He earns something when the buyer takes the financing or the service contract. It rewards offering both. It punishes the buyer if he pushes. How to offer both without the push is in golf cart dealer financing and warranty.

A piece tied to follow-up or reviews. A small amount for leads answered inside your time limit, or for reviews that name him. It only works if somebody counts it every week.

None of these is the right one. Each is a trade.

What goes wrong on the floor with each one?

Three floors. You have probably stood on one.

The flat-per-cart floor discounts to close. A buyer hesitates on the lifted four-seater. The salesperson knows what ends the hesitation today: knock some off, or throw in the rear seat kit. He gets paid the same either way, so he is in your office asking for the discount before the buyer asked him. The board shows a lot of carts, and the store kept less on each one. The patch is a line on the price: who can approve a discount, and what a cart sold under the line pays him.

The gross-share floor hides the cheap used cart. That is the Tuesday scene. The used cart’s buyer gets the slow answer and the short walk-around. A retired couple comes in for a simple used two-seater and gets steered to something bigger, or leaves. The used carts sit, and carts that sit get marked down. What moves them is in used golf cart dealer marketing. What sitting costs is in golf cart dealer inventory management. The patch is the aged-unit kicker, or a floor amount on every cart.

The salary floor waits for walk-ins. Nobody is rude. Nobody is hungry either. The message from 6:15 last night gets answered at 10 this morning, after the carts are pulled out front. In season it is never slow, so follow-up never happens. The patch is one counted piece on top of the salary: carts delivered, or leads answered inside the time limit.

Each plan fails on the one behavior it does not pay for. So the fix is small: a second piece that pays for exactly that.

Which pay plan fits your floor: one salesperson, three, or a seasonal crew?

How to pay golf cart salespeople depends on how many share the lot.

One salesperson plus the owner. You close half the carts yourself, and splitting credit on every deal starts an argument a week. Keep it plain: a steady base, a flat amount for every cart he worked that the store delivers, and a piece for leads answered fast.

Three on the floor. Now the plan settles fights before they start. Say a buyer messaged Jake on Thursday about a six-seater and walked in Saturday, Jake’s day off, and Sarah sold it. Whose cart is it? Write the rule first. Then pay each person on their own carts, post the aged list on Monday, and add a small team piece. Without it, a buyer stands next to a cart alone because she is “not mine.”

A seasonal floor. Say you run two people all year and add two for spring and summer. The seasonal two are not here long enough for a year-end bonus to mean anything. Pay them a base and a flat amount per cart, counted weekly and posted. Keep the aged-unit kicker and the backend piece for the year-round people, who know which carts have been sitting.

How do you pay golf cart salespeople through the slow season?

Decide in summer, put it on the page, and tell them before the first cold week.

A plan that pays only on carts delivered pays well in May and badly in January. If your best salesperson cannot see how he gets through winter, he starts looking in the fall.

Three ways owners handle it:

1. A base that does not move. Set so winter is livable, with a smaller per-cart piece all year because of it.
2. A winter work piece. A counted amount for slow-month work: trade appraisals booked, old leads called, carts photographed and posted.
3. A stay bonus. A separate bonus, on top of what he earned in season, for the people still on the floor when spring opens.

What to have them doing is in golf cart dealer slow season.

How do you pay the person who answers the internet leads but does not close them?

Pay her for what she controls. She does not control the close.

Say the person at the front counter answers every message from the website and Facebook, gets the buyer’s name, the cart and a time to come in, then hands the buyer to the floor. If her pay is the same every week, a fast answer and a slow answer pay the same. If she is paid only when the cart sells, she is paid for the salesperson’s work.

She controls how fast the first answer goes out and whether an appointment got set, with a day and a time.

So her plan is a steady base plus a counted amount for appointments that show. Not appointments set. Set is easy to pad. If you want her tied to the result, add a small amount for each one that ends in a delivered cart.

Write the handoff rule on the same page: the salesperson gets full credit for the cart. If the floor thinks her leads cost them money, her leads get worked last. The steps are in golf cart lead follow-up.

The one-page pay plan, with blanks

One page. If it takes two, he cannot figure his pay in his head while he stands next to a cart, and then the plan changes nothing.

Copy this and fill in your own numbers. There are none here on purpose.

• Who and when. Name. Start date. Runs through the end of the season: you fill in the date.
• What this plan pays for. Three lines in plain words.
• Base. Your number.
• Per cart delivered. A flat amount per cart: you fill in the number. Or a share of the gross on the deal: you fill in the share. Pick one. The least any delivered cart pays: your number.
• When a cart counts. Your rule, in one line.
• Aged units. A cart goes on the list after your number of days in stock. The list is posted every Monday. A cart on the list pays extra: your number.
• Backend. Each financed deal pays your number. Each service contract pays your number.
• Follow-up and reviews. Answering leads inside your number of minutes pays your number. Each review that names him pays your number.
• Discounts. Who approves one, and what a cart sold under the line pays.
• Split deals. Who gets credit when two people worked the buyer: your split.
• Winter. What changes in the slow months and what work is paid.
• When it can change. At the season break. Not before.

Then one housekeeping step: check your state and local rules, and run the plan past your accountant before you hand it out.

How do you change the plan without losing your best salesperson?

At the season break, with his own deals in front of both of you.

A pay change reads as a pay cut until he sees otherwise. Your best person has the most to lose and the most places to go, so plan the rollout around him.

1. Pick the date. The end of the season, never the middle of spring deliveries.
2. Run last season through the new plan. His real deals, cart by cart, for every person. If your best closer comes out behind for the same work, know it before you sit down.
3. Tell him first, alone. Old plan and new plan side by side. Tell him what you want more of: the fence row sold, the night messages answered.
4. Ask what he would change. He knows where the old plan paid for the wrong thing.
5. Run both for a stretch. Figure his pay both ways and pay him the higher.
6. Then tell the floor. One page each, before the gate opens. Questions out loud.
7. Leave it alone until the next season break.

What will a good salesperson ask, and what do you say?

A good one asks hard questions. He is doing the math, which is what you want from the person pricing your trade-ins.

“What would I have made last year on this?” Show him. You already ran it.

“What happens when you close my buyer on my day off?” Read him the split line. If there is none, write one before the meeting.

“Do I get paid on a cart you discounted?” Yes, and here is what a cart under the line pays.

“Will you change it if I have a huge month?” No. If he delivers more carts than anyone ever has and you trim the plan, the whole floor learns to stop just short of that. The plan holds until the season break.

“What about January?” Point at the winter line. If there is no winter line, he has his answer.

How do you know the pay plan is working?

Count the behaviors you said you were paying for. Your own numbers, this month against the same month last year.

• Time to first answer on a lead. By salesperson.
• Aged units. Carts past your days-in-stock line on the first of the month.
• Discounts. Carts that went out under the line.
• Payment and service contract. Of the carts delivered, how many buyers were offered both and how many took them.
• Reviews. Reviews divided by carts delivered, by salesperson.
• Carts delivered per salesperson. And what the store kept on them.
• Who is still here. If your best person left over the plan, the rest of the list does not matter.

Say you started a kicker on aged units in March with nine carts past the line. Made-up numbers. If it is June and there are still nine, the kicker is too small to notice or nobody posts the list. If there are two, it is working. Now check that the discount count did not jump to get there.

That check takes ten minutes with the rest of your golf cart dealer KPIs. What the store keeps after it pays the floor is part of is a golf cart dealership profitable.

The mistakes that wreck a pay plan

1. Copying the car lot. On a cart floor the same person sells the cart, delivers it and takes the call when the charger acts up.
2. Too many pieces. Six bonuses on one page, and none of them changes what he does at the next cart.
3. Changing it mid-season, or trimming it after a big month. You just told the floor where to stop.
4. A different handshake deal for each person. They compare notes in the wash bay.
5. Paying around a missing process. The plan pays for steps, and the steps have to exist first. They are in golf cart sales process.

What to do this week

1. Write the behaviors. Two or three, in plain words.
2. Pull last month by salesperson. Carts delivered, aged units sold, discounts, reviews, time to first answer.
3. Write what the plan pays for today. If it pays for the six-seater and you want the fence row sold, say so.
4. Find the one gap. The behavior you want most that the plan pays nothing for.
5. Draft the one page. Keep what works, add one piece for the gap, and run last season through it cart by cart.
6. Set the date. The season break when the new page starts.

Where does Cart Launch fit?

We do not set pay. We do not hire, manage or sell. You and your team do that.

First, the floor needs buyers to talk to. The best pay plan in the state pays nothing on a Tuesday with no messages. Cart Launch builds the online showroom: every cart on its own page with real photos, a real price and the details in text. Your team keeps it current from a phone. You see which carts got looked at and who reached out. That is what golf cart dealer websites are for, and it gives the used four-seater by the fence its own page.

Second, a pay plan pays for steps, and the steps have to be the same for everyone. We help owners put one sales process in place for the floor, from the first message to delivery, that everyone runs the same way. That is golf cart sales training. Between the owners there is 14+ years operating in 8-figure golf cart dealerships.

If you want to talk through the online showroom and the sales process on your floor, book a call.

Keep reading

• Golf cart dealer hiring salespeople
• Golf cart sales process
• Golf cart dealer KPIs