Centive, the leader in on-demand sales incentive management, has been named a winner in the 2007 CRM WizKids Awards competition, which recognizes companies for innovative advances in front office technology. Sponsored each year by prominent CRM analyst firm Beagle Research Group, LLC., the WizKids Awards honor business technology providers for having had a significant impact on the CRM market.

“Centive Compel is WizKids-worthy for many reasons, such as its compensation plan modeling capability and its unique interactive drill-down dashboards, which present sales representatives with actual commission earnings along with potential earnings that are calculated based on opportunities in the CRM system,” said Denis Pombriant, managing principal of Beagle Research. “It is clear that there are significant benefits when companies add sales compensation thinking to their prospect to paycheck value chains.”

Beagle Research first instituted the CRM WizKids Awards Program in 2005 to identify promising new companies and new business solutions. The WizKids Index is an outgrowth of the firm’s annual report and the index is updated frequently to keep readers abreast of the emerging front office market.

Centive’s flagship product, Compel® is an affordable, on-demand sales incentive management solution that automates the entire sales compensation process in one secure, centralized system. Compel goes beyond simply calculating accurate sales commission and bonus payments; it also provides strategic value by enabling customers to model and forecast sales incentive expense, optimize plan effectiveness, and drive sales performance and top-line revenue growth.

Prominent market research company Beagle Research Group, focused on emerging technologies with impact on business processes, developed a case study for Psion Teklogix to examine the benefits of their recently deployed automated sales commission management system.

Psion Teklogix, a provider of rugged mobile computing systems serving over 80 countries, used to manage sales commissions with Excel spreadsheets. As a result of replacing this manual error-prone environment with Centive’s automated on-demand sales commission management solution, Compel®, the company achieved 100% accuracy in commission calculations. Commission statements now only take three days to prepare rather than the three weeks the company experienced using spreadsheets. Finally, the overall sales commission management process is now integrated, smooth, and efficient and it takes significantly less time to manage.

More than providing a tool for the compensation analyst, Compel also enables sales representatives and managers to track performance and actual commission earnings, as well as forecast earnings based on opportunities in the pipeline, thereby helping prioritize and close deals. Centive wins a 2007 CRM WizKids Award from Beagle Research for retiring another spreadsheet-based business process and replacing it with an effective business tool.

In a recent article published in Destination CRM, Bob Conlin, CMO at Centive, advises that commission compensation is the single most important factor influencing both the performance and morale of sales teams. To ensure quality plans that consistently optimize sales performance, morale, and effectiveness, organizations need to set up a repeatable structured approach to the design of new commission compensation plans.

Says Conlin, “Quality plan design, coupled with efficient automation and frequent communication, will help your company attract, retain, and motivate the best salespeople. It will also provide the best path to optimizing sales effectiveness and performance with a balanced ratio of revenue to cost.”

Critical steps to best practice commission compensation plan design

• Know the company goals — The key objective in plan design is to ensure your plans directly align sales with corporate goals.
• Evaluate current plan effectiveness — Identify issues with your current plans, and use that information in designing new plans.
• Define your sales roles — What roles are required to achieve corporate sales goals?
• Get market data — Establish the pay range for each role and identify the target salary, commissions, bonuses and other incentives needed to be competitive in your market.
• Build the plans — Commission compensation plans are really a combination of measures, mechanics, and policies.
• Model plan scenarios — Model your plans to evaluate the impact at both the macro (plan cost) level and the micro (individual earnings) level.
• Document and communicate — Make sure that your reps understand the plan logic and that the plans are realistic, fair, and attainable. Maintain electronic or hard-copy records of each rep's acceptance of their plan document.
• Automate the plan — Automate your plans with an affordable on-demand commission compensation management solution to ensure accuracy, efficiency and financial compliance.
• Measure and adjust — Regularly analyze actual versus modeled results in terms of both cost and revenue to make sure your plans remain effective and affordable. Adjust plans as needed.

As the leading on-demand commission compensation management solution, Compel® is built on best practices for plan design and compensation management. To learn more about the benefits of Compel, follow the links below.