Sales Performance Management (SPM) solutions are proving to be incredibly valuable for organizations that adopt them. Organizations that implement compensation management solutions can expect to reduce errors by more than 90 percent, reduce processing times by more than 40 percent and reduce IT and Admin staffing by more than 50 percent.
SPM solutions are becoming attractive, not only because early adopters are achieving success, but also because there is increasing pressure on compensation teams to deliver more. Organizations are demanding more than just accurate commission statements that are delivered on time. They need visibility, analysis and oversight into the entire variable compensation process; increasingly, they are relying on their sales operations, compensation and cross-functional teams to provide more sophisticated insights into what is working and what is not.
While the majority of organizations still manage incentive compensation with homegrown solutions, or complicated Excel spreadsheets, more organizations are retiring these solutions in favor of a more flexible, customizable and streamlined incentive compensation and sales performance management system. With this rapid SPM adoption, new trends are starting to emerge.
Lacking a well-designed sales performance management system, an organization can find itself overpaying or underpaying sales professionals – often at a significant cost to the enterprise. The resulting lack of alignment can also translate into missed opportunities and lost revenues. Unfortunately, many organizations continue to manage sales compensation with archaic manual processes and home-grown solutions based on spreadsheets. These systems are prone to error, devour time and resources, and make it more difficult to achieve sales agility.
Many homegrown and spreadsheet-based systems were implemented years ago and were not designed to handle the rate of change, volume of data, expanding product lines and desire for increased analytics, modeling and reporting that today’s marketplace demands. Today’s compensation systems should be able to process millions of transactions a day, efficiently and effectively, in order to manage sales reporting and incentive compensation calculations.
