A new Key to Success for Sales Performance Management

I had the opportunity to present at a Sales Performance Management seminar in London, England a couple of weeks ago.   I was joined by Kevin Pilcher from Colt, who shared his thoughts and opinions on the topic of 'Keys to Success'.  I shared the list of Keys to Success that I have been gathering from SPM project sponsors over the past couple of years.  In general he agreed with their guidance and recommendations, but he also added one of his own.   (many of these are listed under the Keys to Success tab on this blog)

Kevin suggested that in order for an organization to really take ownership of an SPM implementation they need to get involved in the configuration and implementation of the project right from the outset.  He is a big advocate of training right at the outset of the project.   His view is that every organization has unique plans and processes and that their team should be intimately involved in all aspects of the implementation.  Kevin took his team and put them on training classes right at the outset of the project.  They knew the plans at a very detailed level and with the appropriate solution training they added a lot of value immediately. This combination of detailed plan knowledge married with product knowledge were a great asset during the system configuration portion of the implementation.   

There was an added benefit, in that after the configuration, the Colt team was able to be self-sufficient right from the outset, versus having to take on a big learning curve after the system was up and running.

In general  we see projects where the both the vendor and the customer are actively involved provides these benefits:

1.  shortens implementation/configuration times
2.  compensation teams are aware of advanced features and functions in the solution by working side-by-side with vendors experts
3. allows the organization adopting SPM to be much more self-sufficient and the application is much more likely to be business user owned.