LeapComp - Sales Performance Management Blog

The second speaker at the Callidus Survive and Thrive event was Mark Smith, the CEO of Ventana Research. The key message of Mark’s presentation was that to be successful in performance management, it is necessary to focus on aligning, optimizing and understanding people, processes and information.

The Ventana Performance Cycle

Align – To align the business, you must be able to coordinate and drive individual actions based on information and performance targets. This should provide the ability to leverage historical internal and external benchmarks as a reference for driving change in an organization. This should leverage personalized information that can also be continuously monitored. This provides the ability for goal setting, scoring, notifying and automating the performance management process.

Optimize – To optimize the business, you must enable automated and manual methods to collaborate and share knowledge on information and apply analytics for performance improvement. This provides the ability to employ sophisticated models and algorithms for creating forecasts and plans that can simply or dramatically change the organization. This provides the ability to forecast, collaborate, integrate, and act on information.

Understand - To understand the business, a business model that represents the activities and processes of the organization must be created. This provides the ability to measure the historical context of the organization through quantitative and qualitative information. This provides the baseline information through a set of sub-steps - model, access, discover, and interact with information.

Through a survey, Ventana Research found out that the key area of concern for business executives was the ‘Align’ area, followed by the ‘Optimize’ area.

This presentation really resonated with me because I also believe that in the Sales Performance Management field, we often spend too much time focusing on the technology (the SPM solution, the integration of the system, etc), without looking at the big picture and also considering the ‘people’ and processes’ elements. Companies looking for an SPM solution, are often looking for a silver-bullet solution that will solve all their problems. If you read the SPM suppliers’ website, you realize that it is not a wonder that companies believe these solutions will solve all their problems… but the IT solution is often only the tip of the iceberg.

On Saturday I passed my ITIL V3 certification (ITIL is a framework for IT Service Management) and it essentially reinforced the idea that an IT solution should only be considered as a component of the end-to-end variable compensation ‘service’, and that we need to put a greater focus on the business goals. Elliot Ross has many great articles about ‘people problems’, ‘process problems’, and ITIL strategy here.