Why You Need To Automate Sales Incentive Compensation

A recent field survey provides insight into the key business goals and requirements for sales incentive compensation identified by sales and finance executives. It validates the need to automate sales incentive compensation management with an affordable solution that meets these critical requirements.

The Top 5 Incentive Compensation Goals and Requirements of Sales & Finance Executives

#1. Modeling & forecasting: Executives understand that the sales incentive compensation process begins with modeling plans and forecasting commission costs. Their goal is to easily and efficiently build and analyze compensation plan models. They strive to eliminate the guessing game and deliver plans that align sales representatives with corporate objectives, improve plan effectiveness and predictably drive sales behavior.

• Compel® empowers sales and finance executives to easily build, analyze and track multiple plan models to better forecast and control sales incentive compensation costs. Once modeled, plans that meet revenue and cost parameters can easily be rolled into production and their effectiveness tracked graphically overtime.

#2. SOX compliance: Finance executives in particular identify the need to bring more financial control to the sales incentive compensation accounting process. As companies strive to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, it quickly becomes clear that spreadsheet-based incentive systems fall far short in supporting compliance initiatives.

• Compel enables Sarbanes-Oxley compliance in the area of sales incentive compensation management. The solution provides accurate reporting and commission calculations, best-in-class security, consistent processes, document and workflow controls and a valid audit trail of all changes made to plans and data. Compel audits compensation plan distribution and electronic acceptance by plan recipients and maintains plan version history.

#3. Visibility & reporting: Sales and finance executives seek to provide their representatives with immediate visibility into performance and earnings information to keep them focused, aligned and motivated. They also require that representatives and their managers have timely access to compensation reports.

• Compel provides sales representatives and managers with real-time visibility into key sales performance metrics and commission and bonus earnings through secure, interactive drill-down dashboards. In addition, Compel delivers both standard and custom reports, and enables users to create custom exports to Excel.

#4. Flexible plan design & changes: Executives identified the need to support complex sales incentive compensation plans. They also require the ability to easily manage changes “on the fly” — for example personnel changes (organization, transfers, promotions, etc.), changes to plan measures, products, teams, credit assignments, quotas and territories.

• Compels patent-pending wizard-based Plan Builder was designed specifically for business users (rather than IT) and makes it easy to create, manage and modify sales incentive compensation plans. The intuitive user interface provides logical flow and structure to ensure that the user knows where they are in the process at all times and that no step or plan element is missed. The Plan Builder even anticipates the user’s next step and displays only relevant options based on prior selections.

#5. Automation and process efficiency: Executives recognize the high costs and pain associated with legacy incentive compensation systems. They require the ability to calculate commissions faster with fewer resources, and to do this with fewer errors and disputes.

• Compel streamlines the manual and error-prone sales incentive compensation spreadsheet-based process by consolidating all data in a single centralized database that enforces consistent automated processes. The solution easily integrates with corporate source systems and ensures accuracy, data security and efficiency.

To learn more about Compel and how it has helped companies achieve their sales incentive compensation goals, follow the links below.