Centive is a sponsor of Dreamforce ‘06, Salesforce.com’s premier user and developer conference. Salesforce.com is expecting 5,000 attendees to join the annual conference held October 8 - 11, 2006 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

At Dreamforce, Centive will demonstrate the strategic power of the integrated sales process – From Prospect to Paycheck™, delivered by its leading solution Compel™. Centive’s award-winning strategic on-demand sales compensation management solution seamlessly integrates with Salesforce.com™ to provide sales staff with a combined view into actual and opportunity-based commission earnings. As a certified Salesforce.com AppExchange solution, Compel automatically imports opportunities from individual Salesforce.com records and calculates projected participant earnings, taking into account factors like reaching higher ramped rates or accelerators. Compel ensures a single sign-on with the Salesforce.com application and is displayed as a Commissions tab into the Salesforce.com interface.

As a strategic sales incentive management solution, Compel goes beyond the tactical process of calculating commissions and bonuses; it empowers organizations to leverage sales compensation as a strategic sales performance tool. Compel provides sales and finance executives with a powerful tool for modeling compensation plans and forecasting attainment scenarios and related commission costs. Compel also keeps your sales team motivated and focused by providing sales representatives, their managers and senior executives with real-time visibility into key sales performance metrics.

To learn more about integrating your entire sales process, come and visit Centive’s exhibitor booth at Dreamforce ‘06, or follow the links below.

The results of a recent survey of over one hundred US sales executives and managers, conducted by one of Centive’s partners, indicate a serious gap and a lot of room for growth in the strategic use of sales compensation.

The purpose of the survey was to determine to what extent companies leverage sales compensation to drive sales performance, and what tools they are most effective with.

Findings:

• 88% of respondents use spreadsheet or homegrown systems to manage sales compensation.
• Only 40% of respondents consider that their company successfully uses incentive compensation to drive sales performance. 60% believe there is more work to be done to accomplish that goal.
• When asked specifically about tools, respondents were even less pleased with their status. For example, 61% are dissatisfied with the ability of their sales incentive management system to support financial reporting and compliance initiatives.
• 64% of companies need to do more work to enable their sales compensation management system to model plans in order to forecast commission costs and study the impact of key changes on that cost.
• 68% report a gap in their ability to provide sales executives and managers with real-time visibility into performance and results to help them better manage their teams.
• 70% are dissatisfied with the quality of reporting and analytics in their sales incentive management system, critical for pro-active management and fact-based decision-making.

 

These results validate findings of two earlier surveys; one in January 2006, the other in May 2005. Results continue to indicate that the majority of mid-size companies today fail to manage sales compensation strategically or to invest their sales incentive dollars effectively. In other words, most companies waste a significant portion of their commission investments by failing to achieve meaningful improvements in sales performance or revenue growth.

As the leading strategic, on-demand sales compensation management solution, Centive Compel™ enables companies to effectively drive sales performance. Compel achieves that by providing real-time visibility into performance and results, plan modeling to improve plan effectiveness and forecast commission costs, and robust executive reporting and analysis tools. Compel also helps companies achieve financial compliance goals by keeping audit track of all changes made to plans and data, ensuring consistent processes, and accuracy.

To learn more about strategic sales compensation and Compel, follow the links below.

Most sales executives agree that sales compensation should be one of the most effective tools for motivating sales people to sell more and achieve quota targets. So what steps are required to achieve desired results with your sales compensation programs? See the list below to find out.

Five Steps to Effective Sales Incentive Programs

1. Model various plan scenarios and forecast attainment results and commission costs. The first step to an effective program is to deploy plans that provide suitable attainment rewards at reasonable cost. This cannot be a guessing game or you may end up with a dangerously skewed attainment/cost distribution curve. You need to model various scenarios and carefully examine results before deploying your plans.
2. Measure the right results. Define a limited set of measures for each plan. These measures should align your sales team with specific corporate goals for your products and services, such as revenue, margin, market share, or new customer acquisition.
3. Monitor results to stay on top of progress and cost. Provide sales and finance executives the ability to track and compare, in real time, modeled and actual results so you can make adjustments if necessary.
4. Anticipate the impact of possible market and organizational changes. Understand how commission costs at the individual and company level will shift in response to key changes. Set up alerts and be prepared to adjust plans accordingly at the earliest sign of change.
5. Provide your sales staff and managers with visibility and timely feedback on results so they know where they stand and what they can do to improve performance so your company goals are met.

 

Managing sales compensation strategically to achieve desired results is a process and a science; you simply cannot achieve desired results without a sales compensation system that supports that process. As sales consultant Rick Page says in his book of the same title – Hope is Not A Strategy.

That’s why every month, more and more companies are turning to Compel™. Compel contains all the necessary tools to help you design, model, test, roll-out, calculate, track, communicate, manage and pay on the most effective sales plans for your organization.

In fact, Compel is the only on-demand incentive management system that provides a complete set of plan modeling and commission forecasting capabilities. Compel allows you to forecast future commission expenses and model the impact of plan changes on commission cost and individual earnings. In addition, Compel enables sales representatives or independent agents to forecast their own earnings based on future sales. And, Compel is also the only on-demand sales compensation management system to provide real-time visibility into performance metrics via interactive dashboards.

To learn more about strategic sales compensation and Compel, follow the links below.