LeapComp - Sales Performance Management Blog

As I noted in a previous post, a “new” SPM company made the latest Gartner’s Market Scope 2008 list; ZS Associates. I heard about ZS before when I read a great incentive compensation book called “How to Design and Implement Plans That Work – The Complete Guide to Sales Force Incentive Compensation” written by ZS’ co-founders and a consultant. Maybe I’m guilty of reading the book too quickly, but what I had not realized is that ZS Associates actually created their own sales performance management application, which they call the Javelin Software Suite.

After digging a bit deeper, I learned that ZS Associates is a consulting company based in Illinois, with a strong focus on the pharmaceutical industry. The Javelin suite is offered both on-premise and on-demand. Javelin Incentive Manager is built to handle complex plans requiring a lot of flexibility, and is attractive to organizations with a sales force of 5oo to 10,000 individuals. Many additional modules are available including a territory designer, a quota designer, and an MBO manager (Management by Objectives).

I scheduled a call with several ZS Associates employees to get a demo of their applications. I will dedicate a post to describe the Javelin Incentive Manager, and another one to discuss some of the other modules I have seen.

Back to business… I asked this group why I hadn’t heard about Javelin before – I haven’t exactly been hiding under a rock… However I have never been involved on a life sciences project yet and this may be why I hadn’t heard about their solution. The historical focus for the Javelin application has been on life sciences, and its flexibility has made it a good fit for complex requirements of that vertical. However, the application is not life sciences specific by any mean, and it’s really a change in strategy that pushed ZS to be more proactive at marketing the Javelin Incentive solution to the high tech, insurance / financial services, and manufacturing industries.

Unlike other software vendors, ZS is a consulting firm with a product, more than a vendor with some consultants. Incentive compensation is their largest practice area and they have about 200 consultants dedicated to compensation related projects. Because the company is much larger than a typical vendor, and since they focus a lot on consulting, their workforce is spread across 17 offices in 10 countries. As could be expected, and as they confirmed, having offices close to their customers makes a big difference. ZS also has an office in India with more than 100 consultants, which it plans to expand to over 250 consultants in the next 3 years.

In my next post I will review the Javelin Suite, based on the extensive demonstration I received last week.