Incentive, Compensation and Sales Performance Management

It is no secret that a Compensation Management System is a significant investment. In the case of a SaaS solution, a fee per payee will become an on-going operating cost. In the case of an on-premise solution, license purchase, hardware and system integration fees will consist of the bulk of the initial cost, followed by related operating costs to keep the system running.

I collected a fact from a Gartner research for which I have lost the reference: “On average, companies that don't use information technology to track payments from customers overpay their employees by 3 to 8 percent of their bonuses and commissions.”

One of the difficulties encountered when calculating commissions in some manual form or with an archaic system is that it is often challenging to process returns. When returning items, the commission for these returns should be taken back from the sales person. The task is even more complex when dealing with partial returns, where several items where purchased and only a fraction is returned; in such a case, only a part of the commission should be removed from the original sales person. A good Sales Performance Management application should be able to perform this type of calculation without too many difficulties.

The actual return on investment depends on the implementation cost, the quality of the existing system, time savings with the new system, the amount of commissions paid incorrectly (and above what they should be) without an ICM solution, as well as other factors.

From what I have seen, the Return on Investment promise is real and not just a marketing trick... But remember that when considering a sales performance solution, the ROI should also take into acount the sales performance improvements due to more accurate and timely incentives.

Here are a few articles related to Return on Investment in the ICM space:
ROI Study Report: Sales Performance Management Solutions
Building a Business Case for EIM
Gartner Survey

Gartner published an excellent research in July 2007 called “Market Scope for Sales Incentive Compensation Management Software”. This research discusses several of the sales incentive compensation management offerings and is surprisingly free.

The offerings evaluated are:
ACTEK
Callidus Software - TrueComp
Centive
Oracle (E-Business Suite)
Practique Associates
SAP
Synygy
Trilogy - Versata
Varicent Software
Westport Software Group
Xactly

The evaluation criteria were: Overall Viability, Customer Experience, Product/Service and Market Responsiveness. Results of the study are summarized in this table:


This study is a good start to help identify the prominent vendors of Incentive Compensation Management offerings. The best choice would be determined on a case-by-case basis since some of these vendors focus on a particular company size (number of payees), on a particular technology and in some cases on specific industries.

I would also like to highlight that several more vendors exist but were excluded from the study because they did not meet specific criteria including having at least 16 clients, of which at least 12 using the system in production, and with enough cash to fund at least one year of business operations.