I am going to start building a sales force selling nutritional
products and I was wondering how I go about developing a fair and
equitable sales compensation plan?  Question I have are:  What should
the base be?  What amount of commission would be fair?

Since I dont know too much about your situation I dont know how this
will help but here goes.

The answer depends on many factors. How easy is it to train a new
salesperson? What is the cost of living? Are you worried about a high
turnover rate? What kind of salesman are you trying to attract? How
much can someone sell per month on average? There are other factors
too, just naming a few. Here is what I know.

Sales salaries are generally two fold. The first is the base salary
and the second is either profit margin based or a percentage of total
revenue. For instance, you could pay someone 30k per year as the base
salary and then 2% of the total sales they make not to exceed 10k per
month. So if they sold 10k in one month, the would make 30,000/12 +
10,000 x .02 = 2700 per month.

You could pay them a percentage of the gross profit margin. e.g. they
get their 2500 per month base plus: Total sold 10000 - cost of goods
7000 = 3000 dollars profit mulitplied by whatever percentage you
wanted to give them. Some people scale that percentage so the higher
the percentage of profit margin the better the payout percentage. Say,
you wanted to give them 10% of total profit or 300 dollars in this
instance.

I would say if you really want to get the most out of your movers and
shakers I would pay them a high percentage of the gross profit and a
low base salary. Over time you would change this strategy, once you
become more successful you wont want to stick with this. Once the
product and market share increases the goods will sell themselves and
you wont have to pay your sales force too much and you can reap more
of the rewards. Hope this helps.