LeapComp - Sales Performance Management Blog

Every day some people are landing on LeapComp by searching for “[vendor name] sucks”, “which SPM vendor sucks”, etc. I thought I would share my perspective on this matter. I think I probably got some attention?

I don’t think that any sales performance compensation vendor can claim that 100% of their customers are very satisfied with their solution. There is often at least a few people who have had a bad experience and like to believe that it’s all the vendor’s fault.  So what else can cause an SPM project to fail?

Look in your own yard
Did you nail down the requirements properly? Was the scope well defined and communicated? Did the scope slowly creep up until the project was an entirely different beast? Did new requirements enter the picture? Did you support the implementation team adequately by providing them with all the documentation, information, access to subject matter experts, etc, in a timely manner? Did your team provide the required help when necessary and actively helped out with the implementation efforts? Was the schedule reasonable or did you have try to cut corners by skipping over some planning or testing efforts?

Not the right solution?
So maybe from your implementation-support perspective, everything was flawless. So could the problem be that the solution you selected didn’t meet your needs? If you do a poor job at defining the project scope and high level requirements before selection a commercial solution, how will you know if it really meet your needs. Ahh, but that’s the Catch 22! How are you supposed to really know all your needs without knowing more about the solutions? Maybe you KNOW that you want to do analytics, but you don’t really know what the application can do for you exactly… So you end up selecting a solution claiming to have best-of-breed analytics only to realize that it can’t do what you want. Read my vendor selection posts for more ideas on how to select the vendor who will best meet your needs. Hint: I think it’s a good idea to get help from someone who knows what they are talking about and who have worked with many SPM solutions… but I could be biased, that’s one of the things I do for a living.

Maybe it was your implementation partner that was not so great?
Could you do all this and still have a failed project? Yes! You spent all this time selecting a vendor, but how much time did you spent selecting an implementation partner? Maybe you just assumed that a big system integrator like Accenture and Deloitte were the best because they are already working with your company on other projects. Or maybe you selected the cheapest company on the block. Maybe you just selected the vendor’s implementation team thinking they must be those who know their products the best. I would assert that even more important than selecting the right solution, you must ensure that there is a good fit with the implementation partner you select. After you choose a solution, you won’t need many interactions with the vendor; but with the system integrator, you will need to work with them for some time! Do your homework, check their references, find out other companies who have used their services and ask them about the outcome of the project. I wrote another short piece about choosing an implementation partner where I discuss some pros and cons of large companies, versus vendors, versus boutique consulting firms.

In conclusion, before deciding to exclude a vendor from your search based on some horror story, consider that any failure to an enterprise system integration can be caused by many factors, and that the vendor is [usually] never fully responsible for the failure.  Also make sure that you select the best implementation partner.  Finally, support them well during the implementation.