SPM News Weekly Wrap Up

The lunch and learn in Dallas at the Capital Grille yesterday went well, some good conversation, good food, and very interesting themes and questions from the attendees.  Hope to see you at the next one. 

Next week I’m really looking forward to speaking at the World at Work Spotlight on Sale Compensation conference.  I’ll be co-presenting with Jennifer Kerr from Ecolab a very talented manager with a world of experience in how to leverage technology and reporting to drive sales performance.   Our presentation is titled ‘Sales Performance Management: Market Review and Vendor Selection’ and will be on Wednesday the 22^nd from 8:45 – 10:00.   More information on the workshop can be found here. For anyone attending the conference, I guarantee it will be worth your time to stop and listen.  For those of you not attending the conference, I’m not going to share the whole presentation here, but there a few exciting highlights that I will be posting the weeks to come.    

Does Technology matter when it comes to Sales Performance Management?  You better believe it! I finally had the chance to sit down and read the excellent research titled ‘Sales Performance management: Getting Everyone on the Same Page’ from Peter Ostrow, Research Director, Sales Effectiveness at Aberdeen Group.  Performance Dashboards, Automated Solutions to forecast rep performance against goals / expected compensation, and CRM or SFA that includes a compensation module are all things that best in class organizations share more so than companies defined as average or laggards. The full research report can be found here.

Well that’s it for this week’s wrap up - For the most current up to date Sales Performance Management news please follow me at https://twitter.com/SPMconsulting

SPM News Weekly Wrap Up Sept 11th

If you are in Dallas next Friday and would like to hear more about Sales Performance Management I will be speaking at a free luncheon and would love to see you there.  The main topic will be how SPM can help strategically align your compensation plans, drive the right behaviors, and increase selling time.  More details and RSVP information can be found here: SPM - Lunch. Network. Learn  


This week I got down and dirty with 5 of the leading applications in the space.  It had been a while since I had actually touched the products, so I went and logged into to a number of different environments and built some rules, built some hierarchies, created a workflow, made some manual adjustments and modeled some scenarios of potential new plan changes.  There is something to be said for doing vs. seeing and the end results was pages and pages of notes and some new insights into the latest product functionality and ease of use.  Good stuff.    


I saw a quote this week from Donal Daly the CEO of The TAS group and founder of the Sales 2.0 Network, "The impact on a customer of a bad buying decision is always greater than the impact on a sales person of a lost deal."  I agree 100% with Donal and I find that I really enjoy the role of customer advocate when helping with a vendor selection process.  The corporate and personal risk to my clients of potentially purchasing the wrong technology solution to meet their problems is something that I take very seriously. As I see more and more companies and individuals market their Vendor Selection services in the Sales Performance Management space I hope that they share the same viewpoint and don't just view it as another project. Thinking about this here are three attributes to look for in a company that I would trust to help you match the right solution with your business needs and aspirations.  


1. Experience - The consulting firm should have experience in running Vendor Selection projects, both from a time perspective and from a quantity perspective.  If the consulting firm hasn't led 10-15 of these projects I would take that as a huge red flag.  It takes time to develop the skill sets, knowledge and tools necessary to lead these projects.  Something else to look for business and technical background.  The consulting firm should have the institutional knowledge to address both IT and the businesses concerns when looking at new technology.  


2. Methodology - At every step in the process the consulting firm should be able to bring to the table it's own methodology, best practices, templates and worksheets. 


3. Knowledge - What pool of resources will the consulting firm pull their knowledge of the different technologies from?  Hopefully it includes a majority of the following - relationships with the vendors, implementation expertise on the products, recent deep dive demonstrations of the potential technology, research analysts, and production customers.        


That's it for this week, I hope everyone has a great weekend.  

  For the most current up to date Sales Performance Management news please follow me at https://twitter.com/SPMconsulting

SPM News Weekly Wrap Up

In the absence of a lot of industry news, this week has flown by for me personally.  The first part of the week was spent finishing up and submitting my presentation for the upcoming WorldatWork Spotlight on Sales Compensation event.   I’ll be speaking on the Sales Performance Management Market and on Vendor selection.   With such a dynamic and rapidly evolving space I wanted to present a different way of thinking about the technology solutions available and I think I succeeded.   For those of you attending the conference I hope you can find the time to stop by and participate in the discussion.   For those of you that aren’t able to attend I’ll share the most well received ideas shortly afterwards.

The rest of the week was spent speaking with clients (and perspective clients).  This week a common theme I heard was cost - How to drive cost out of the administration of compensation?  To me the answer is not to cut costs per se but to relentlessly drive economic value to the organization by better utilization of human capital, technology, and the optimization and where applicable the automation of processes.   Today I want to quickly touch on the human capital side of the equation.

To achieve cost-cutting measures it rarely makes sense to arbitrarily cut heads in the sales compensation administration department.  The focus should be on changing the department from a cost-center to a center of excellence that adds value back to the organization.  Which leads to the question – Can compensation administration organizations be differentiated?  Is there a vast difference between the average and market leading organizations?  Our experience says yes - It is just not enough to produce accurate compensation payments in a timely manner and provide some reporting to the field.  This level of performance is not even average and unfortunately I still see organizations that cannot execute on these table stake activities (note – even the poorest performers shouldn’t lose hope!).    

Now envision a market-leading organization where the self sufficient compensation team delivers excellence in the above activities and proactively evaluates effectiveness of the compensation program and delivers improvements.  An organization where a whole host of reports, dashboards, and analytics are made available for all compensation stakeholders – Finance, Field Sales, Sales Management, and Executives.   An organization where when sales would like to make a change to the compensation program or introduce a short-term incentive the questions are not, how long will it take to code and how much will it cost to do so?, the questions are more along the lines of, “How would you like to measure the effectiveness of the change?” How about a compensation administration team that can support the quota setting and territory planning activities as well as administer disputes but more importantly systematically drive errors out of the process to prevent disputes from happening in the first place?  These are just a few example of what high-functioning teams are out there doing today.   

To move from the organization of ineffectiveness and inefficiency where the question is how many heads to cut to an organization of the future that adds value takes significant vision, leadership, and persistency. To achieve this transformation take heart in knowing that the roadmap to success already exists and the payoff in terms ROI is there for the taking. 

For those in the states, hope you have a happy and safe labor day weekend.   

  For the most current up to date Sales Performance Management news please follow me at https://twitter.com/SPMconsulting