I am often asked why Sales Performance Management isn’t just
a part of some other enterprise application.
Based on the background of the individual asking, ‘some other application’ is generally the organization’s CRM, ERP or
HR system.
The truth is that while SPM touches
all of these areas it is not well served by any of them. The design point of each of these
applications is not Sales Incentives. Adding a few columns and a few reports
doesn’t solve the problem of accurate, timely and efficient payment of variable
compensation. Nor does it start to solve
the challenges around modeling, reporting and analysis of sales performance.
Let’s look at each of them.
Some would say that Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM or other CRM
solutions are the obvious choice of where sales commissions should be handled. For many organizations the CRM is the place
to capture customer centric information and related activities. It stores what the customers purchase, it may
capture what they order, but very rarely does it capture who gets credit for
the sales of those items, how commissions were handled, hire and termination
dates of potential recipients of commissions, and what attainment towards Quota
the credited sales rep was at in order to determine accelerators. This
is just a short list of the things that are needed in a modern sales
compensation system. Without that
relevant data it is impossible to calculate commissions simply by looking at
the CRM. Loading all of the data and
building the calculation logic that is required is also not possible or not in
scope for most CRM solutions.
Many say Success Factors, PeopleFluent, Taleo, Workday or some other HR or Talent Management solution is the place
for compensation and benefits information and therefore the place to capture
information about variable pay. The
challenge is that HR systems do not track detail about what customers purchase
what products. This is critical to a
sales compensation system. HR systems do
not capture the components of the plan in order to run complex calculations
needed to determine specific payouts. In
fact, most HR systems are generally good at data collection and reporting, but
do not have the concept of a calculator or modeling engine as part of their
solution set and therefore should not be used for sales compensation.
Let’s have a look at ERP solutions. ERPs are assumed to be the place that houses
all the transaction data needed for calculating commissions. While the transactions are a key ingredient
to a compensation system, ERPs were not designed to manage commission
exceptions, overrides, splits and plan adjustments that are the course of
business in incentive compensation. The
concept of prior period adjustments, claw backs, holds, spifs and draws are not
common to the process efficiency mindset of ERP solutions.
None of these systems were designed for sales commission’s
calculations purposes, and while they all have some of the data needed, none
have all the data nor the dispute
resolution, plan modeling and other necessary functionality. These systems are not well suited for your
sales performance and commission management needs.
So how are organizations managing this critical process? According
to Gartner, nearly 90% of organizations with over 100 sales people are still
managing commissions with home-grown solutions, Access databases, Excel and
manual effort. Outside of North America
there is even less automation. A number
of organizations have come to realize than in order to deliver timely, accurate
commissions, and in order to design and implement plans that drive the sales
behavior they want, they must look to specialized software for this task.
Software that can accept data from a myriad
of data sources, determine the
proper crediting for all the incoming transactions, calculate commissions, and then produce
commission statements, reports and analysis.
Modern SPM systems also allow compensation teams to model different
scenarios, analyze plan effectiveness, manage the territory and quota
processes as well as calculating commissions.
Organizations
that implement SPM systems are more likely to drive down administrative costs
significantly reduce errors and put more selling time back into the hands of
the sales team
Traditionally a lot of Sales Performance Management Systems
have been focused on the incentive compensation process. While there can be many (occasionally
hundreds) of input sources to an SPM solution, organizations generally consider
outputs to be - commission statements, a payroll feed, and few summary
reports. 
