Best Practices for Sales Performance Management

Christopher W. Cabrera, founder and president of Xactly Corporation, published a white paper on December 18, 2007: “Five Best Practices for Sales Performance Management”.

These best practices are:
• Use incentive compensation to align payments to strategic corporate objectives
• Motivate and reward performance with contests, SPIFs (special performance incentive funds)and non-cash incentives
• Model and forecast your compensation plans prior to deployment.
• Use analytics to drive sales performance
• Integrate CRM and compensation management applications for greater insight into sales opportunities

I think those points are very obvious… Actually, they are usually the driving force behind automating the compensation management process. I recommend reading the article, it's short and fun to read.

The Five Best Practices for Sales Performance Management paper can be found here.