LeapComp - Sales Performance Management Blog

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!