LeapComp - Sales Performance Management Blog

Before joining my current company, I was a consultant at Accenture. Accenture is a large “global manaegment consulting, technology services and outsourcing company”. I was in their Business Intelligence practice, where I first got involved with ICM projects.

I recently came across a 3 page article about Accenture’s view and approach to incentive compensation management, and I thought it might be interesting to others.

The paper first gives a quick run-down of what effective incentive compensation can do. The main points are:

• Give companies the fl exibility to respond to rapidly changing
market demands and to quickly implement new sales
strategies and plans.
• Enhance the productivity of the sales force productivity
by increasing their confi dence in the incentive program.
• Support the most effective selling behaviors with leadingedge
technologies and tools.

They claim that their research suggests that a $1 billion business unit could boost their pre-tax profit by $13 million by using better motivational tools and incentives to increase performance of its sales people. That sounds impressive, but that’s really only a 1.3% return - not bad, but very conservative compared to other estimates.

What I like most about the article is its framework to implementing an incentive compensation plan. However, this “framework” is not discussed at all, it is just a picture used as a space filler. The illustrated steps are:

• Sales Force Design and Objectives Setting
• Compensation Plan Design
• Compensation Process Re-engineering
• Compensation Organization Model Design
• Compensation Plan and Hierarchies Setup
• Compensation System Design, Build and Run
• Enterprise Data and Systems Integration
• Business Change Management

I’m not sure I understand how Data and Systems Integration can come before the “Run” phase, but it’s a pretty graphic and it gives a good holistic view of building an incentive management system.