Incentive, Compensation and Sales Performance Management

The field of incentive, compensation and sales performance management was born from the need of companies to define and implement sales performance plans, specifically commissions and bonuses. Several applications exist to manage, measure, track and reward employees to influence sales force behavior.

The goals of compensation management applications are to:

• manage centrally pay-for-performance plans
• align strategy with incentive compensation plans
• reduce errors and inaccurate payments
• quickly adapt to evolving business challenges
• improve decision-making by providing timely information and analytics capabilities
• increase profitability and efficiency by reducing administrative, software development and maintenance costs

Common Acronyms:
CRM: Customer Relationship Management
ECM: Enterprise Compensation Management
EIM: Enterprise Incentive Management
ERP: Enterprise Resource Planning
ESP: External Service Provider
HCM: Human Capital Management
ICM: Incentive Compensation Management
SaaS: Software as a Service
SFA: Sales Force Automation
SPM: Sales Performance Management

ICM and EIM are often used to discuss similar functions and applications. More recently, several vendors have adopted the term “Sales Performance Management” to encompass ICM, EMC and EIM.

In this blog I will discuss various topics and news related to compensation, incentive and sales performance management. I will focus more particularly on the IT aspects of implementing compensation management systems.