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Ventana Research Sales Performance Management Value Index

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Ventana Research recently released their Sales Performance Management Value Index 2009 research paper which benchmarks four leading SPM solution suppliers and their solutions.

Unlike the Gartner SPM report which I have discussed a few times, the Ventana Value Index evaluates how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements for software that enables and supports Sales Performance Management. The Index evaluates the software in the context of seven key categories: adaptability, manageability, reliability, usability, functionality, total cost of ownership, and return on investment.

You can jump on their website to download the executive summary after a quick registration.

The research notes that there are 5 vendors providing solutions across the sales performance management spectrum: Callidus Software, Merced Systems, Synygy, Varicent Software and Xactly Corporation. The other solution providers were out of the scope because their offerings are too broad (focus on CRM and Sales Force Automation) or too specific (focus on only a certain area of SPM or on a specific industry).

As expected, after compiling the weighted scores for each category, the value index difference is within 1% for the top 3 vendors (Callidus, Varicent and Merced), with Xactly lagging only a few percents behind. Most categories yielded very close results, with the largest (but still small) gaps in the capability and validation categories.

These results are not extremely surprising since the research focused on how well the SPM offerings met the buyers’ requirements, and since most SPM solutions offer very similar core functionality. However, this doesn’t mean that there are no significant differences in how, or how well the solutions handle various SPM requirements.

As for Synygy, some things could be inferred from a company concerned to be benchmarked against competitors by an independent research firm.

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With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

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When selecting a new SPM system - or any COTS system - people want a solution that will meet all their current needs…  but they also want a solution that will meet any of their future needs.  What are those future requirements?  They are unknown at the time of purchase.  It should not be a surprise that flexibility of a solution is often one of the top criteria for its selection.

But with great power comes great responsibility…  The more flexible a system is, the easier it will be to make design decisions during implementation that could potentially have a negative impact in the future.

Flexibility also often comes at a cost.  Many “less flexible” solutions (often SaaS solutions) are often less flexibility than other enterprise solutions.  However, they still meet all the requirements of most clients, and it is this lack of flexibility that can allow them to be deployed in a shorter time frame.

Companies should really consider how far in the future they really should be looking.  Are the requirements between today and 3 years from now really going to evolve that much?  Looking at a more than 10 year horizon for a piece of software is an eternity.  Furthermore, with an on-demand solution, it’s easy to switch to another solution at anytime… and with an on-premise solution, upgrades every 2-3 years will be required to maintain support from the vendor.

Finally, if for some reason your requirements are really so complicated that they are not supported by a leading SPM solution, ask yourself if your compensation plans really make sense.

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