On May 20, Varicent hosted the value-rich and info-packed Spring Summit. And despite being virtual, the speaker roster and subject agenda were nothing short of excellent. With the inestimable Gayle King, co-host at CBS This Morning, and editor-at-large of Oprah Daily, on hosting duties, here’s our top ten Spring Summit snapshot.
1. The Varicent Advantage Customer Program: By bookending Spring Summit with news of this exciting program, there was no doubt its impact landed successfully. Introduced by Nicole Kent, Varicent’s Senior Vice President for Customer Success and Product Strategy, and Colin Wong, our General Manager, Financial Services they told us exactly what to expect. Varicent customers can look forward to a free set of services, including on-demand learning, administrator enablement (great for filling in knowledge gaps on the Varicent ICM solution), and exclusive opportunities to try out new Symon and TQP product offerings through adoption and entitlement programs.
Another key part of the new program is Ask an Expert, where customers get free consulting time with the very people at Varicent that know the products and solutions best. That means the opportunity for live resolutions, and migration assistance, place “How-to” sessions. As the last part of the Varicent Advantage Customer Program triumvirate, Colin talked us through Digital Education. With the prospect of an on-demand customer learning portal coming to a device near you soon, and offering more than 70 courses, there is plenty for VA members to enjoy. More than 130 clients have already participated in program trials over the last six months, and their participation has shaped the final product model and roll-out.
2. The Alexander Group Collaboration Announcement: News of a partnership with this leading Revenue Growth Management Consultancy was shared at Spring Summit, with this collaboration kicking off over the rollout of a free benchmarking app, available through Symon.AI, participants were treated to a product demo. The app allows you to benchmark your progress against similar businesses in your sector, harnessing the Alexander Groups respected and useful knowledge base on how to improve a wide set of performance metrics. And if we were to sum this up in three words, they would be Growth, Efficiency, and attainment, the three key benchmarks available with the new app.
3. Incentive Compensation Management (ICM) Updates: In a session presented by Sunshine Zhou, Senior Customer Services Manager at Varicent, we discovered more about new developments and features to Presenter Adaptive, the online business reporting builder. In a demo that was focused on the look and feel and UX, Sunshine took the role as payee, showing changes to the payee dashboard. Stacked area, combination chart, simple gauge, and donut chart are the new visuals, and data tables can be styled in many different colors, font sizes, and cell arrangements.
Reed Chakin, Senior Solutions Consultant walked through the mobile app changes. The headline news is that there is a ton of updates for administrators; when in portal access they can decide and define which reports are available to users, and single presenter reports dynamically show the right charts for a team by only showing the ones that have data.
There was also some good news about Varicent Excel Add-In. This provides users with the ability to connect to ICM data and use the power of Excel so they can query ICM reporting or make data changes.
4. Partner Panel: The guest speakers for the partner panel slot were, Scott Werstlein, Vice President, North American Sales at OpenSymmetry (a platinum sponsor of Spring Summit 2021), and Lillian Muller, Sr Manager of Commercial Operations Analysis & Reporting at Carnival Cruise Lines. In this informative session, we heard the story of how OpenSymmetry improved the efficiency and helped Carnival to create new reports as part of their new employee incentive plan. With more automation and reduced manual activity, life on board is more plain sailing for the cruise line.
5. It’s all about the new Varicent Territory and Quota Planning: Varicent’s new product was introduced by Marcus Hearne, Chief Marketing Officer. He reinforced how critical robust TQP is and reminded us of the common pain points and pitfalls of poor territory management, before handing over to Dominique Tucci, Regional Manager. Dominique presented a demo, introducing the online audience to the new and game-changing concepts of Plan Targets and Battle Cards as a central part of TQP. Useful outputs from this key session were confirmation that the new app can seamlessly load historical data and hierarchies via Symon.AI, create battle cards for each team, and organize territories any way you want. You can also adjust quotas that automatically update in battle cards. We’ll be explaining way more about that battle cards are and the new TQP app shortly, so keep visiting our Sales Performance Think Tank section on the Varicent website.
6. Varicent Academy: Announced by Varicent’s Chief Operating Officer Neil Whitney, this free online learning center will be the digital hub for all things (and people) related to sales performance management, territory, and quota planning, as revenue ops. The plan is to make learning and development on every Varicent solution accessible to all via a fantastic, online platform.
7. EDGE Scholarship Update: EDGE – which is the acronym for Equity, Diversity, Growth, Empowerment – is the scholarship program designed to provide more educational opportunities for diversity in the technology sector for those that have been underrepresented in this space, including women, the Latino community, and people of color. To facilitate changing this status quo, Varicent had planned to offer several sponsored spaces for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) courses. The response was beyond our expectations. There were more than 2100 applicants for the 15 inaugural places. As the demand and quality were so high, the big news was that the number of places was increased to 25.
8. Incentive Compensation Management (ICM) Use Cases: Joel Shapiro, Chief Analytics Officer at Varicent and Professor of Data at Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management shared a use case from the recent Symon World Championship, where we saw how Symon.AI helps NY Taxi drivers predict which rides will earn the most tips.
Mark Altshuller, President and CEO of Varicent, alongside Kimberley Deobald, the GM of Symon.AI presented three use cases to demonstrate the speed and power of Symon.AI, covering Data Validation and Commission Credit Ranking
9. Customer Spotlight: The Director of Information Shared Services, Sales Performance Management, at Citizens Bank, Fred Potvin, was the customer in the spotlight for Spring Summit. He gave an illuminating account of how Varicent has brought about powerful transformation for the bank and its customers.
10. Revenue Intelligence: Martin Fleming, our Chief Revenue Scientist, shared how Varicent is integrating Symon.AI into the Lead to Revenue solution by talking through Opportunity Health Scoring, Lifetime Value Churn, and Discounting Demos. Stressing the value of data, Martin gave a very convincing case through demos of how Symon.AI is can not only help customers get more from their data insights but strengthen their sales pipeline and detect seller churn.
With such a wealth of content and product updates covered at Spring Summit, our team of experts and senior leaders will be adding plenty more relevant information and insight to Varicent’s Sales Performance Think Tank in the coming weeks.
