LeapComp - Sales Performance Management Blog

Last week I attended the Sales Performance Accenture Webinar on Insurance Industry Best Practices by Jon Walheim, Partner – US Insurance Marketing, Sales and Service and Jason Angelos – Partner, Global Incentive Compensation Management.

Accenture performed a study with insurers and asked them which 3 topics were most important in the overall market place.  54% of the respondents selected “improve sales performance”, 49% selected “increase retention” and 36% selected “improve service performance”.  This says a lot on the focus on sales performance management solutions!

In this same study, Accenture also identified that the highest level of priority regarding customer acquisition and retention was to attract new customer and to focus on retention.  Insurance companies also hope to improve their performance through training, specialized tolls and sales support.

“Imagine if all 15,000 Exclusive Agents exhibit target behavior set XYZ for a customer situation XYZ.  No guessing.  No interpretation.”

Accenture’s framework for targeting value in sales transformation is to increase revenue, decrease cost and improve predictability.  Sales performance management solutions can assist with each of those “levers”.  ICM can impact each of those levers.  Revenues can be increased with increased flexibility in incentive plan design, more insight to data and self-service tools, and analytics.  Costs can be decreased with accurate incentive compensation and easy plan administration.  Predictability can be attained with plan modeling features.

Jon also mentioned that behavior is driven by only three factors: ability, motivation and context.  For an individual to exhibit the proper behavior, he must have the skills and knowledge for the job, and be the right person into the right role.  Performance objectives must be specified and measured, and the person must be motivated and encouraged to show target behaviors.  Finally they must have the right work assigned to them, have the right tolls, and have access to the right information.

Here is another attempt at justifying investing in incentive compensation from a return on investment perspective.  According to Accenture’s research, investments in programs to motivate and reward sales people, have the greatest potential to impact profits.  The impact on better motivating and rewarding people, and at attracting and retaining people could represent 23 $M on pre-tax profit for moving from average to high performance for a 1 billion dollar business unit.

Best practices for ICM Implementations
Accenture made several recommendations for ICM implementations:

• Simplify operations
• Optimize controls
• Don’t try to gain efficiency if it compromises sales performance
• Strive to develop new capabilities to deliver improved flexibility and speed to market
• Optimize compensation plans and focus where it counts
• Improve reporting to increase trust with the end users.
• Provide single source of sales performance results
• Manage software vendors to shape future product functionality
• Enlist a deeply skilled integration partner to increase delivery capability and decrease risk.

I’m glad I took some notes during the presentation, because even if we were told that we could obtain the presentation from Accenture after the webinar, Accenture refused to share it with consulting companies!  You might have more luck than I did by contacting Jon by e-mail here:  jon.walheim@accenture.com