Sales compensation is the single most important factor in influencing the performance of your sales team. Effective plans communicate to each rep where and how they should focus their sales efforts in order to meet or exceed specific performance targets.

As you prepare for 2009, keep in mind that sales compensation is your best tool for steering and course-correcting the sales team as market influences drive change in corporate goals. The key to managing change is to have a consistent and proven process for designing, modeling, deploying and communicating new sales compensation plans.

Sales compensation plan design is a science; there is no "art" to the process. Sales plans based on gut feelings or what "worked at my last company" are guaranteed to result in missed revenue, commission budget overruns, and/or costly sales rep turnover. To create quality plans that optimize sales performance, morale and effectiveness, you need to follow a repeatable and structured approach to the design of new compensation plans.

Follow the link below to download the white paper "Designing New Sales Compensation Plans". This white paper describes the critical steps you should follow to ensure your 2009 sales plans are optimized to drive performance.

True on-demand solutions like Centive Compel, built from the ground up as multi-tenant solutions - where a single instance of the software securely serves all customers - offer tremendous economies when compared to traditional "on-premise" solutions.

With true, on-demand solutions, there is no hardware or software for the customer to purchase. Instead, the customer subscribes to a monthly service at a pre-defined subscription rate.

Traditional on-premise solutions require the upfront purchase of a perpetual license agreement and an ongoing maintenance and support agreement. In addition, on-premise solutions require the customer to invest in hardware and supporting software (for example, licensing Oracle or WebLogic). In addition, these solutions require a significant investment in time from IT resources.

Centive has a detailed ROI calculator you can use to compare the first year and on-going costs of on-demand vs. on-premise solutions. Follow the link below to download your complimentary copy. 

Interested in learning more about the Software-as-a-Service marketplace? Softletter's SaaS University is the place to answer all of your questions regarding buying, building and/or deploying SaaS solutions.

Centive's Chief Marketing Officer, Bob Conlin, will be one of the presenters at the upcoming conference, scheduled for October 14-16th in San Francisco, CA. Bob will be speaking on "SaaS Sales Compensation Models."

Follow the link below to learn more about the SaaS University event, then register to attend.