If you’re managing a sales team or sales operations division and can honestly say that your Sales Performance Management (SPM) software is working as hard as your most diligent team member, then congratulations, your job is done. You’re clearly utilizing that platform to not only display sales and leader boards but using its capabilities to leverage the most effective Incentive Compensation Management (ICM) program, ensure all is fair with quotas and territories and that you’re harnessing the analytics and reporting functions to better inform those performance management conversations, right? Or are you now questioning your own certainty? If you feel that your current platform and application is maybe missing the mark on at least one of these elements, or that there’s you could be achieving even more with your current platform, this blog will provide insight into what you should expect from your SPM software.
1. Putting Faith in Your SPM Software’s Figures
A decent SPM displays who or what is scoring big, whether that’s high performers or best-selling products. This could be via an electronic leader board or pie charts on a dashboard. While there’s nothing incorrect about that, it’s all quite basic. What you should include is an SPM software tool that is accurate, transparent, and accessible to everyone that needs to see it, especially when setting and adjusting Incentive Compensation schemes. And it’s not just about what can be easily seen, it’s the mindset that can set in when there is a lack of transparency and any doubt regarding the information available. According to The Total Economic Impact Forrester Study commissioned by Varicent that monitored and surveyed a business using their software, getting fully on board with the software reduced incidents of shadow accounting by 60%¹.
Sticking with the topic of numbers when using a robust SPM software tool, the other pertinent statistic to come out of the Forrester Study was that payment accuracy improved by 90% when working with the Varicent software². The more a business moves away from dated, inaccurate legacy systems and manual inputting, the more reliable the results and therefore greater efficiency is achieved.
2. Motivation, Information, and Trust
Giving your sales professional the clearest picture possible of where they are in terms of performance and ranking via SPM software is a sure-fire way of finding their motivational sweet spot. As a manager, you can get beyond the leader (or possibly loser) boards and use the customizable features to have more informed performance management conversations, structure coaching sessions for anyone that may be struggling, and ensure that your team is being dealt a fair hand when it comes to the allocation of territories and quotas.
The benefits for your team out in the field is that with a higher level of visible information about their product and territory, the better informed and confident they are when meeting customers. This in turn increases the chances of turning a hot lead into a guaranteed customer so it boosts the bottom line.
In the Forrester Study, one of the most common issues around this theme was centered around commission pay-outs and whether these were true and fair. A quote from the report taken from one of the respondents said that before the implementation of the Varicent solution:
“On paydays where we pay out commissions, there would be a line outside the sales managers’ doors. People would be asking: ‘How did you calculate this? I have a different amount.’” ³
By giving access to all those that need it to not just the compensation leader-boards, but the power to post queries at any time, trust was built, and teams felt more incentivized as they believed they were working on a level playing field.
3. Understanding Your Strategy and Product Offering with SPM Software
As much as a deep dive into your SPM software capabilities is about the people using it, the other massive takeaway is how much more incisively you can understand your product range and business strategy. By mining the analytics to the max, you’re well on the way to not just increasing profits but achieving company-wide KPIs and objectives. A fully integrated platform gives you the power to probe product performance across territories and understand where and why competition may be an issue. As a result, you’re not only working from current and historical data, but you’re also able to forecast the future much more effectively – for your sales team at least. Using the output, you can ensure that no territory is under-resourced, your strongest performers are allocated the area and quotas that will allow them to prosper. And where there is evidence of a downturn in sales, you’re much better equipped to determine the reason – whether that’s the under performance of an individual, an issue with product marketing or strategy, or a wider circumstance like an economic downturn.
In business, knowledge is power. And in sales, power is the ability to use every tool possible to sell more and sell better. Tapping into the almost unending depths of your SPM software provides you with both these unquantifiable strengths; sharing this strength with your sales team may just be the thing to keep them engaged and on track for a long time to come.
Get your copy of Forrester TEI study now and find out how your sales team and figures could be positively transformed by our SPM software solution.
¹, ² Page 2 The Total Economic Impact of Varicent’s Sales Performance Management Software
