Incentive Compensation and Sales Performance Management Survey

Monthly Archive for May, 2008

Xactly Incent 4.0 - Effective Dating and Other New Features

Published
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Julien Dionne
on May 31, 2008
in Industry News and Vendor / SPM Solution Review and Info
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Xactly will be releasing the new version of its On-Demand Sales Compensation Management application in the next week or two.
The main changes in Incent 4.0 will include an improved user interface and reports, “effective dating”, improved organizational management and advanced searches.
User Interface and Reports:
The interface looks good and most of the changes were made around the new functionalities for effective dating. The reports look prettier and also have new security/privacy features. More reports are available and they work “out-of-the-box”. As far as I know these reports are still not very customizable, so it will be important to make sure they satisfy the reporting needs.
Effective dating:
This is a feature I described earlier when discussing versioning. Effective dating allows to give a certain value to an object between certain dates, and a different value between other dates. This can be used to track changes to teams and reporting releationships, job or role changes, promotions, name changes, targets, etc.
For example, if a person’s salary goes up from $50,000 to $60,000 on March 31st, the original version will show a salary of $50,000 and a new version will be created with an effective date of March 31st and a salary of $60,000.
Effective dating is extremely useful because rather than scrambling to make changes before a payroll date, changes can be done at anytime. Since these changes can be tracked, effective dating also improves auditability (it is easy to see how historical commissions were calculated).
Note: Effective dating in Xactly is currently limited to people, positions, hierarchy and relationships. Hopefully a future version of Incent will allow effective dating of other objects such as plans, rules, quotas, etc.
Organizational Management:
Without effective dating, organizational management was a bit tricky in previous versions. Changes in hierarchy and relationships are now much simpler and much cleaner.
Advanced Search:
Advanced searching makes the process of finding the right object or result much quicker. It was also a needed add-on to be able to search for effective dated objects.
I have seen a few minor upgrades of Xactly (3.x) and with the scope of these changes, this new release (version 4) clearly deserves it’s own number. Lets just hope that effective dating will be applicable to all objects in the near future.

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Enterprise Incentive Management News

Published
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Julien Dionne
on May 31, 2008
in Industry News
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Xactly
Xactly Wins Coveted 2008 CODiE Award
Sales performance management leader takes home software industry’s top honor for best financial software solution

XACTLY NAMED TOP FINALIST FOR 2008 AMERICAN BUSINESS AWARDS(SM)
Leading on-demand sales performance management vendor chosen from among 2,600 entries for prestigious Stevie® Awards

Callidus
Sierra Atlantic Partners With Callidus Software to Advance Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Delivery
Provides Global Delivery Model to Achieve Sales Performance Management Growth

Centive
Centive Named to JMP Securities’ Hot 100 Software Companies
“We are pleased to be honored with inclusion in the Hot 100 report by JMPSecurities,” said Michael Torto, president and CEO, Centive.

Centive Named as Finalist in 2008 American Business Awards
On-Demand Sales Compensation Management Leader Recognized for Providing Exceptional Customer Service

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Networking 2.0 - The Art of Making Connections

Published
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Julien Dionne
on May 27, 2008
in Events and Miscellaneous
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I’m deviating a bit from the incentive, compensation and sales performance management topics to talk about professional networking. I was invited by a Canadian Heritage Network (Generaction) to be a keynote speaker at an event next Thursday (May 29, 2008) in Ottawa. The topic of my presentation is “Networking 2.0 - The Art of Making Connections“. You can download my Power Point presentation here.

The main areas I will address include how to build, maintain and use a professional network. It sounds simple, but I will provide many useful tips and best practices on networking strategies and networking mistakes to avoid. I will also discuss how online social networking can be used to stay connected with your network.
I listed 3 good books about networking in my presentation deck. Here are the links to their author’s website:
I hope to see you on Thursday.

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For Love or Money: Social vs Monetary Reward

Published
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Julien Dionne
on May 26, 2008
in Research and Articles
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Social Status and cash activate the same reward centre in the brain. That’s what two papers in the latest Neuron journal (Volume 58, Issue 2) are saying. I’m always very interested by cognitive research attempting to explain how certain activities can affect human behavior.

The article “Know Your Place: Neural Processing of Social Hierarchy in Humans” by Dr. Caroline Zink and colleagues explains how information about social status activated the same brain regions.

The second article “Processing of Social and Monetary Rewards in the Human Striatum” by Dr. Norihiro Sadato supports how reputation affects people in the same way as money does.

A subscription is required to read those articles, but they were summarized in ABC Science article “Praise or Cash? Your brain doesn’t care“.

Personal Story:

These studies support my own view on the topic. Last month I discussed the impact of the size of a money bonus on performance. It would be very interesting to see a similar experiment where some a group receive a lot of encouragement and the other group receives no praise at all, to compare their performance.

One of my previous employers, as many employers do, offered an annual performance bonus. This bonus was a percentage of the annual salary, but every employee received a very similar bonus. Employees developed a sense of entitlement to this bonus, and always thought they had met all their performance objectives and deserved the full amount. I’m just giving this context to illustrate how the cash incentive most likely did not have a positive impact on performance.

The employer, aware of this problem, introduced a “praise” program, consisting of recognizing employees who had made a significant contribution. Managers were encouraged to simply give a “Thank You” card to exceptional employees. I have no idea how this program affected performance… But it’s impact on motivation was priceless.

Employees receiving these “praises” would shine for weeks. Common sense tells me that motivation can easily be correlated to performance. I can safely say that the thank you notes I received from colleagues I had helped during evenings and weekends really motivated me to keep working hard - there is nothing like feeling appreciated!

Another Story on Social Status

A few weeks ago I read an article about how job titles could be used to motivate employees, even if no pay increase is associated with the new title. I have a friend who had his job title changed from “Business Dev Manager” to “Manager, Entrepreneurship and Innovation Development”. He’s been jumping up and down since he got this “promotion”. His reasons for being so happy: the title is unique, distinguishes him from his peers, and sounds better from his perspective.

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SPM Testing Template - Part 5

Published
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Julien Dionne
on May 23, 2008
in Testing
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Incentive Compensation Management test results can be recorded in several ways. One of the approach I like to use groups all plan names, rule names, conditions, expected results and testing status on the same spreadsheet. I find that by keeping all this information together, it is easier to quickly get the picture of the overall testing progress. It also allows to keep all the information on the same spreadsheet instead of having to maintain 2 spreadsheets with identical information.

Here is an example to get started:

Other benefits of using an Excel spreadsheet to record test results instead of a Word document include:

  • Ability to quickly highlight failing tests in red
  • Ability to filter information displayed (e.g. display only failing tests)
  • Test results can be printed on fewer pages
  • Ability to create macros to perform more “fancy” features such as displaying the number of days a certain issue has been opened.

Other columns could be added to add additional information such as the date at which the test was performed, the name of the tester, how critical the test is, the actual result when different from the expected result, and comments.

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PlanIt: Another On-Demand Sales Performance Solution

Published
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Julien Dionne
on May 21, 2008
in Industry News and Vendor / SPM Solution Review and Info
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I received an e-mail some time ago from Matt Tyre, a Sales Compensation Consultant working at Sales Resource Group (SRG).

Sales Resource Group Inc. is an industry leading sales compensation professional services organization that provides world class software, consulting and outsourcing services, with expertise in sales incentive programs and sales force effectiveness.

I had heard about their president David Johnston before, from his articles in the Canadian Professional Sales Association (CPSA) Contact magazine. David has over 20 years experience consulting for various organizations and teaches sales compensation for WorldatWork.

What distinguishes Sales Resource Group from many other small sales compensation management companies is that they offer their own sales compensation solution called “PlanIt”.

PlanIt is an On-Demand Sales Performance Management solution offering the same functionalities as other applications in its category (incentive calculations, reporting, analytics, etc). In addition, PlanIt also has a module providing guidance to optimize compensation programs and align these programs to business needs, and allows to route relevant documentation to its users.

User Interface
Similar to other applications, PlanIt displays some high level compensation information to the payees when they login. From this screen they can easily review their current revenues, the top 10 performers and their ranking compared to their peers. What I particularly like about the main screen is the News /Announcements which occupies an important position at the top center of the screen. This ensures payees don’t miss out on important news.


Reporting
The reporting section is also very important for the payees. Most of the reports are available “out-of-the-box” and illustrate all the information in different level of details. Payees can drill down to the order level, or see high level summary of their compensation and ranking. Custom reports can also be created easily.


Implementation
Overall the user interface was very nice, but the big question remaining was, how easy is it to implement and maintain solutions built with PlanIt. Not surprisingly the answer was, the implementation is user friendly. It is all done through a user interface and does not require any deep technical skills.

What I particularly liked about the Plan Design interface is its ability have approved plans and plans awaiting approval. I have not seen this functionality in other applications I am familiar with.
Mobility Feature
Only a week ago I discussed Varicent’s mobility feature and I said I hadn’t seen this anywhere else; PlanIt is actually available for use on PDA’s including Blackberry handsets an Palm devices since April 18th. I haven’t seen PlanIt mobile or Varicent mobile, but I wouldn’t be surprised if most vendors followed with a similar feature.

Stevie Award for Sales Compensation Program of the Year
In 2006 and 2007, major clients of SRG won the prestigious Stevie Award for Sales Compensation Program of the Year.

Conclusion
In conclusion, I was a bit surprised I hadn’t heard about Sales Resource Group before being contacted by Matt. However, with the level of maturity I noticed from their application, I would not be surprised if we started to hear more about them.

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