Author: Bailey McCaffrey
Sales Compensation tools can allow you to get more out of your sales team, ultimately helping you hit goals and align with company objectives. Read this blog to learn how a sales performance management (SPM) tool will help you with planning, analysis, accuracy, and communication!
Sales compensation plans are crucial for hitting sales team goals.
In this series, we have covered several Sales Compensation essentials, including how to design and implement a compensation plan, how to know if you’re getting the most out of your sales comp plans, and what is the methodology of compensation planning. This blog will focus on how SPM tools and integrations will help support and assist your sales team in driving higher performance.
Sales Compensation tools are constantly evolving and improving. With this being the case, refining your systems is a great way to stay ahead of competitors. Keeping sales technology up-to-date and optimizing sales operations will help you measure, manage, and hit your goals.
Sales compensation is the most effective when it gives reps and sales professionals an incentive to work hard and work efficiently, while keeping team, company, and corporate goals front-of-mind. The best way for an organization to achieve this result is through planning and modeling, measurement and analysis, plan communication, and ongoing administration. The following points will explain how SPM tools help to make these results possible.
Modeling and Costing
SPM tools can help your team by developing the right sales compensation models and plans in a shorter amount of time. One way to leverage an SPM tool is by creating and pricing plans to see how they’ll work before implementing them. Feel confident in the future by knowing how these changes will perform over a period of time by using planning features available in multiple SPM tools. Furthermore, these tools can also assist with territory planning and quota allocation if these are part of the program. By using tools to plan for the future of your comp plans, you will have a better understanding of what will work best for your team and how much it will cost.
Measurement and Analysis
SPM tools can assist with plan and program measurement and analysis. SPM tools contain analysis functionality that allows for deconstructing the large amount of data that is processed to pay sales commissions. Using analysis functionality questions such as the following may be answerable and helpful to drive tactical and strategic decisions:
- Which regions or sales teams are adapting to selling new products the best?
- Who are our best sales managers for improving performance of under-performing sales reps?
- What geographies are being impacted the most severely by an economic downturn?
Paying commissions on time and accurately is the primary function of SPM systems but the wealth of data gathered and processed to do so can provide key analysis capabilities helping companies make the best tactical and strategic decisions.
Plan communication and acceptance
Proper communication and plan acceptance is essential to a sales team’s understanding of new plans or plan changes. SPM tools have the features necessary to make that easy on your team including the ability to send new plans out to the salesforce for review and sign-off. Communication is vital to letting everyone know about changes and putting into practice the corporate direction and principals these plans were created to reinforce. There also may be legal implications, especially within certain industries (e.g. auto retail, insurance) that make formal acceptance of compensation plans a necessity; plan acceptance functionality of SPM products allow for recording and audit ability of these acceptances
Administration and reporting
Every sales team manager or operations employee knows how much time and energy goes into administration and reporting around the sales commissioning process. SPM tools help cut down on the time spent paying reps, providing reporting, and managing disputes. SPM systems improving efficiency can free up administration time allowing focus on other more strategic activities.
Effectively using sales commissions is important to your organization’s success, but it can be time and energy-consuming. SPM tools are essential to getting the most out of employee compensation plans while minimizing their administration costs. Corporate sales and performance goals are more easily achieved with measurement, analysis, communication, and easier administration of the sales incentive program provided by SPM tools.
Still wondering about the importance of SPM tools or have questions about which tools are right for your business? Canidium wants to help you get the most out of your Commissions plans. Just click the button below to reach out to our expert team!
Written by Bailey McCaffrey, Canidium's Marketing Coordinator