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Tag Archive for 'Accenture'

The Haunted Winchester Mystery House

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I spent last Thursday in sunny California (it probably ended up being a bit colder there than in Ottawa), to attend the Callidus Survive and Thrive: Secrets to Selling More Executive Briefing Series. I had the chance to finally meet Jason Angelos from Accenture and Mark Smith, CEO of Ventana Research in person, as well as Steve Apfelberg, Jock Breitwieser and several other people from Callidus Software I only knew virtually.

Jason’s presentation about trends in Performance Management, factors driving motivation, and best practices was very similar to the webinar I covered here. I’ll let you read that post if you want to refresh your memory Accenture’s point of view on what are the 3 factors driving behavior (Ability, Motivation and Context) and what are the levers to achieve performance objectives.

But this time, Jason started his presentation with a story about the Winchester Mystery House.

Here are a few facts about this Winchester Mystery House:

  • The mansion is located in San Jose, California
  • It took 38 years and $5.5 million dollars to build it (construction stopped in 1922)
  • The house has 160 rooms, 24,000 square foot, 10,000 windows, 2,000 doors, 6 kitchens, 40 bedrooms, 13 bathrooms, 47 fireplaces…
  • 149 builders were involved in its construction
  • No architect were involved and 0 blueprints or master plan were ever created
  • 65 of the house’s doors lead to blank walls
  • 13 staircases lead nowhere
  • 24 skylights are covered by floors

That sounds just like a large scale incentive compensation implementation; the implementation is broken down in many phases with a scope more or less defined, many contractors are involved on the project over its lifecycle, development is often an ongoing effort, the number of components involved often becomes very large and the project can be more complex than anyone had foreseen.

To avoid making a Winchester Mystery house of your implementation, we should learn that we need to plan very carefully before implementing any large scale project. You don’t want your SPM implementation to have ‘staircases’ going nowhere and ‘doors’ leading to blank walls. And you especially don’t want to become an ‘attraction’ for other companies to visit only to see how ‘messed-up’ your implementation is!

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Webinar Summary: Insurance Industry Best Practices

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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

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The Haunted Winchester Mystery House

Webinar Galore - 2 SPM Webinars Tomorrow

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I will try to provide coverage on this blog for these 2 webinars taking place tomorrow. The webinar hosted by Callidus features an Accenture partner discussing the insurance industry, and the Xactly webinar features Jeff Kaplan discussing on-demand sales performance analytics. Follow the links to register.

Callidus 7/29 @ 9A CST - Best Practices from Accenture - Align producer and advisor behavior, maximize mindshare - and effectively manage compensation
https://callidussoftware.webex.com/callidussoftware/onstage/g.php?d=570992696&t=a

Learn about insurance industry best practices from Jon Walheim - Accenture Partner - North America Insurance Marketing, Sales, and Service Lead. You’ll learn about key trends in the insurance industry, challenges that organizations are facing, and what insurance leaders are doing to gain competitive advantage.

Xactly 7/29 @ noon CST - The Business Case for On-Demand Sales Performance Management Analytics
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/415893690

In this Webinar, Xactly’s Karen Steele and THINKStrategies’ Jeff Kaplan will discuss how post-sales analytics can provide new and strategic insight into an organization’s selling patterns, commission spend, product performance, sales rep and team performance, and sales plan effectiveness. They will examine how post-sales data – traditionally scattered across a variety of disparate systems including ERP, HR, and Payroll – can be now be integrated and analyzed with an eye towards enhancing business strategies, changing sales rep behaviors, and super-charging sales organizations.

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Sales Compensation Best Practices in the Banking Industry

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Last week I attended the Accenture/Callidus Webinar “Industry Banking Best Practices for Maximizing Your Customer Value and Sales Behavior“. Below is a summary of some of the information that was discussed. I will leave out Callidus Wachovia’s case study for another post and focus on Accenture’s point of view.

Kirk Coleman, senior executive at Accenture discussed how the Banking industry was facing many issues and challenges. Regardless of the current market situation, customer expectations keep rising. Those who can exceed these expectations will have an opportunity to distinguish themselves from the competition.

Best Practices

  • Drive an incentive culture, not a bonus culture
  • Focus on the right employees
  • Timely delivery of rewards
  • Support capability development
  • Plan for a journey - not a “project”

Tests that banks should perform regularly to check and maintain their effectiveness:

  • Top performer’s pay relative to the market
  • Pay dispersion between top and average performers
  • Pay and performance correlation
  • Alignment of payouts with key financial/marketing objectives
  • Variability of incentive compensation year-over-year
  • Speads of quota attainment versus plan spread
  • Relevance and controllability of performance measures
  • Time spend correcting payouts

Kirk noted that behavior of customer facing employees is increasingly important in the banking industry. Developing capabilities across channels is important to avoid improving in one while losing in another.

Another point that Kirk stressed is the importance of timely delivery of rewards. Many banks have quarterly and annual bonus, but in these cases it is difficult for payees to see the relationship between their incentive pay and their behavior. In many cases a monthly incentive strategy would be more appropriate to be able to re-enforce the desired behaviour.

Kirk concluded by saying that Sales Compensation is essential for banks to effectively align sales force behavior with their goals.

I found an additional paper by Accenture “Sales Performance Management: Enterprise Incentive Management from Accenture” which adds some details to the topics covered by Kirk during the presentation.

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Upcoming Free Webinar: Industry Banking Best Practices for Maximizing Your Customer Value and Sales Behavior

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A free webinar “Industry Banking Best Practices for Maximizing Your Customer Value and Sales Behavior” will be hosted by Callidus Software and Accenture on Wednesday April 23rd at 11:00 EDT.

Learn about banking industry best practices from Accenture to ensure that your front line sales people are selling efficiently and effectively - and selling the right products to the right customers. Together with strategies and best practices, you’ll also learn how other financial services organizations are using the latest solutions and technologies to optimize these processes, and achieve competitive advantage.

For additional information and to register for the event go to: http://www.callidussoftware.com/go/08/banking-best-practices-to-maximize-sales/

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Harnessing the Power of Incentive Compensation Management

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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.

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