My personal observations, thoughts and opinions on the Incentive Compensation Management and Sales Performance Management Software.
Showing posts with label Gartner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gartner. Show all posts
January 17, 2012
November 5, 2011
Michael Dunne - 4 stages of Sales Performance Management
I just finished reading
the draft of a whitepaper I commissioned with Michael Dunne. Most people
involved in Sales Performance Management know Michael from his years as an
industry analyst with Gartner. He has a wealth of experience, and a unique
perspective on this market.
I asked Michael to
write-up his thoughts on the evolution of Sales Performance Management.
He has segmented the adoption of SPM into four distinct phases and he provides guidance for organizations in each of these phases. The
full whitepaper and accompanying webinar will be announced shortly so keep an
eye out for the announcement over the next few days.
Follow @bhartlen or @varicent for regular updates and to get the details on the webinar and whitepaper when they are announced.
October 31, 2011
2011 Sales Management Association Sales Productivity and Performance Management Conference
Bob Kelly and the team at the Sales Management Association put together a great event in Atlanta recently. The agenda was filled with many experts including academics, practitioners and vendors. Most of the attendees were from sales operations and the people I talked to were happy that there were many sessions targeted specifically for them. Some of the topics covered included Inside the Sales2.0 Organization, Predictive Analytics for Sales leaders and Technology’s impact on Sales Management Practice.
Andris Zoltners, the ‘Z’ in ZS associates opened Day 1 with a presentation on the importance and impact of Sales Management on sales productivity. Day two saw Barry Trailer from CSO Insights and Mark Selcow President of Merced, present a keynote comparing improving sales force productivity to the new Brad Pitt movie Moneyball. Joe Galvin, former Gartner and Sirius Decisions analyst seemed to be moderating, participating and generally adding value to most of the sessions that I attended. With his history and rich background in sales effectiveness I always find that Joe provides some great insights.
I was fortunate to have the opportunity to present on the ROI of Sales Performance Management solutions with Justin Lane of OpenSymmetry and Rebecca Sandberg of Elavon. Justin has such a broad base of experience implementing SPM solutions that he had a lot to contribute. Rebecca shared her experiences at Elavon, a global credit card processing organization and gave advice on implementing an incentive compensation management solution in a global financial services organizations.
While this was the inaugural Sales Productivity and Performance Management conference, I certainly hope it was just the first in a long line of successful conferences hosted by the Sales Management Association.
October 18, 2011
6 New SPM Trends - Trend 2 - Sales Adoption of Mobile Devices
Last week I blogged about the 6 new trends I see in Sales Performance Management. The first trend was about the need to handle increased business complexity. This week's blog is about mobile devices for sales teams.
Many questions are now being considered by
sales organizations everywhere. What is the appropriate mobile device for the
sales team? What is the right set of
functionality that needs to be delivered to the mobile device? There is no universal right answer, and the
adoption of mobile technology for sales teams is a broader issue than SPM. There are three key things that organizations
have to look at when it comes to mobile adoption - Device Support,
Functionality, and Culture.
Device
Support – What platform do you need to
support? On the tablet side, Apple has
gone out to an early lead with about 68%[3] market
share of all tablets sold. The market
however is still young and there is lots of room for technology advances. Organizations must consider whether they want
to take a device specific approach, or an agnostic approach. Looking for vendors who support standards
like HTML5 and browser agnostic support gives an organization the most
flexibility in tablet support.
Applications coded specifically for a platform may have tighter
integration with that platform, but will be more limiting in terms of device
support as the market matures and shifts.
Functionality - Once the platform is
decided, and then you must decide what functionality you want to deliver on the
mobile device. In most SPM scenarios
simply replicating a full desktop or web experience on a smartphone doesn’t
work. Have a look at your current
commission statement and imagine how much would be viewable on a Blackberry, Android
or Iphone window. Typically commission
reports are multi-page statements with lots of columns and in order to
comprehend the entire statement you would have to be able to look at more than
one or two columns at a time.
Organizations are well advised to design reports and outputs
specifically for the mobile device, and not settle for delivering full
reporting onto mobile devices – just because you can.
Culture - this is often overlooked when considering mobile device
support. Some Sales Leaders want to ‘get everything on the smartphone and
tablet’ to avoid all the wasted time lugging around laptops, trying to
figure out VPN or other connecting activities.
The idea of ‘right here right now’ information delivery has a huge value
over waiting for the sales reps to connect when they are back home, in a hotel
or office. There is another train-of-thought
where sales leaders are concerned about everything that takes away from their
sales teams ability to have customer facing time during the day. The idea of delivering commissions, quota and
territory update information constantly throughout the day is a
distraction. Their belief is that this
kind of information should be delivered to the laptop/desktop when the reps are
not out in the field.
The
overriding trend we are seeing in mobile device support is that the adoption of
mobile technology for sales is directly proportional to the frequency of data
updates. Organizations that report on
sales and commissions daily are much more likely to want to drive this
information out to mobile devices than organizations who update their data
monthly or quarterly.
October 11, 2011
Six Trends in Sales Performance Management
Sales Performance Management (SPM)
solutions are proving to be incredibly valuable for organizations that adopt them. According to research firm Gartner,
organizations that implement compensation management solutions can expect to
reduce errors by more than 90%, reduce processing times by more than 40% and
reduce IT/Admin staffing by more than 50%.[1]
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 as they want to understand better
what is working and what isn’t.
While the majority of organizations still
manage incentive compensation with home-grown solutions, or lots of Excel
spreadsheets, more organizations are retiring these solutions in favor of a
more complete packaged incentive compensation and sales performance management
system. With this rapid SPM adoption new trends are starting to emerge. This paper discusses the top six trends that are
influencing organizations who are considering implementing new software solutions
to help them improve sales performance and incentive compensation practices.
Over the next few weeks I will discuss each of the 6 trends.
The first...
Trend 1: Increasing Business Complexity
In a recent study conducted by the
Economist[2]
an overwhelming majority of survey respondents (86%) think that business
has become more complex in the past three years, many describing their
businesses as chaotic. This increasing
complexity is often driven by the reality that organizations produce more
products, sell in more markets, through more channels with more complex
workflow processes. These organizations also
have an increased need for speed when it comes to getting results. Adding to this challenge is that many
organizations are struggling just to keep up with an ever-increasing volume of
data. Over the past couple of years
organizations increased the amount of data stored by a staggering 62%[3]. With this hectic pace of change it is easy to
see why existing technologies, plans and processes in sales compensation cannot
keep up with new requirements.
Most organizations do not expect the rate
of change nor the ability to capture data to decrease in the coming years. Most home-grown and spreadsheet based
systems were implemented years ago and were never designed to handle the volume
of data, rate of change, expanding product lines and desire for increased
analytics, modeling and reporting. It is
not uncommon to see that today’s compensation systems need to be able to
efficiently handle millions of transactions a day in order to manage sales
reporting and incentive compensation calculations.
When considering SPM technology, evaluation
teams must consider their requirements to quickly load data, calculate
commissions and produce the necessary outputs.
They should also estimate, to the best of their ability, data volumes
and complexity for the next few years to ensure that the application is capable
of handling those volumes. Organizations
looking to implement new systems are well advised to try and determine their
performance requirements and conduct a scalability and performance test when
looking at acquiring new software.
[1]
Gartner Marketscope for Sales
Incentive Compensation Management Software, Michael Dunne, March 2010
[2]
The Complexity Challenge, How
businesses are bearing Up, Economist
Intelligence Unit, 2011
[3]
EMC annual shareholders meeting presentation.
May 9, 2011
What is Sales Performance Management?
Sales Performance management is about putting timely and accurate data in the hands of decision makers in order to aid them in making more informed decisions. Who sold what products at what price last month? What are our top selling products by region? Are commissions payouts in-line with expectations? Are my territories all covered effectively? How many reps are over 70% of quota and now on accelerators? These are just some of the questions that sales management ask every day. In most organizations there is no simple, consistent and accurate way to get the answers to those questions. The ERP has some of the information. The CRM has some of the information. The HR system has some of the information. Much of the rest of data is in emails, spreadsheets and legacy systems. Analysts who are charged with finding out the answers to these questions generally resort to a combination of extract files, Microsoft Access and Excel to pull the data together to provide the answers. Often the resulting report or analysis is incomplete, late, and suspect in terms of accuracy. The burden of pulling it all together makes even the simplest of requests a daunting task. When it comes to managing, processing and reporting on territory assignments, plan eligibility, quota attainment and commissions calculations the process looks much the same.
Sales Performance Management (SPM) help organizations understand and improve the performance of their sales organization by offering a complete solution to manage incentive compensation, roster management, territories and quotas. Most common sales performance systems provide capabilities to:
· Integrate data from a variety of disparate source systems (commonly ERP, HR, CRM, spreadsheets and legacy systems.) This eliminates a lot of data duplication, expensive and error-prone custom ETL routines, multiple and inconsistent versions of the data.
· Calculate results – the ability to take all the input data, and then match source data with eligibility rules, territory assignments and the plan components to derive accurate commission calculations.
· Create custom reports – with an embedded reportwriter. These include the ability to capability to generate personalized and branded commission statements, operational and management reports and analysis.
· Automate workflow processes – to ensure that all operational aspects of the commission management process are documented and effectively executed.
· Provide complete audit trails - The ability to track all of the actions, data changes and resolutions involved in Sales Performance Management processes. This includes plan acceptance, dispute, inquiry and resolutions, calculation expectations etc.
Organizations looking to implement a Sales Performance Management System should look for the following benefits:
- Aligning sales resources to organizational goals and strategies
- Providing timely, accurate and actionable sales information in order to improve decision making
- Streamlining the administration of incentive compensation management processes in order to reduce errors, costs and time
- Provide increased visibility into the compensation process for audit, compliance and management oversight
The definition of Sales Performance Management differs slightly depending upon the perspective and background of the individual or organization. I have included Sales Performance Management (SPM) definitions from a few of the more popular sources and experts below.
Ventana Research
Ventana Research defines Sales Performance Management[1] as a coordinated and integrated set of sales-related activities, processes and systems that help organizations meet customer revenue goals and objectives. Only those sales organizations that integrate people and processes tightly with information and technology are able to maximize their effectiveness, from top management, through finance and operations to the sales representative on the front line.
Ventana believes that Sales performance management today remains more art than science. They also believe this must change. Advancing the maturity of sales and thus its effectiveness and contribution to company success requires not just improved processes but ensuring that the people associated with those processes are evolving to become the sales talent that represents the best of your company. One of the essential underpinnings of this evolution is complete access to information about sales activities and to the metrics that most significantly track the performance of the sales organization.
Gartner
According to Michael Dunne, VP Research of Gartner, in his note - Introducing the Concept of Sales performance Management[2], SPM represents the next generation of best practices for sales. It establishes a strong foundation for improving sales execution. Use this concept to better organize sales territories, quotas and compensation plans to increase sales.
Wikipedia[3]
SPM solutions provide executives and sales management with a clear view of critical sales data, such as what products were sold where, by whom and to whom, that enable quick and informed course correction to ensure the alignment of sales strategies to desired business outcomes. These solutions are unique in their ability to solve the “one-two punch” of insight and action (i.e., knowing what business strategies need to be changed and having the tools to make the required changes). Together, these products and services offer medium-to-large enterprises in a multitude of industries the ability to transform their incentive payment systems into strategic business weapons to drive profit growth.
April 3, 2011
Michael Dunne to Keynote INSIGHT11
I am very happy that we managed to get Michael Dunne, Research Vice President for Gartner to join us at INSIGHT11 (Varicent’s Users Conference) this year. He specializes in researching leading issues concerning sales performance management, sales operations, sales enablement, sales incentive compensation, sales analytics, price optimization and management, as well as sales and marketing alignment for Gartner. As a 16 year veteran of Gartner he brings a lot of experience gained not only from his research but a significant amount of client interaction.
I was talking to Michael last week and he was mentioning that he is has a lot of new thoughts on what is happening in the Sales Performance Management space. He shared a couple of his ideas and I can tell you that we are in for a treat. It got me thinking and certainly put some things in perspective. Michael will open up the second day of our conference.
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