Your Ultimate Guide for Sales Incentives and Compensation

Deepen your understanding of Sales Incentives and Compensation, which along with Strategic Sales Planning and Sales Territory & Quota Planning, is one of the three key pillars of modern Sales Performance Management (SPM).

Increasing accuracy, transparency, and flexibility in your Sales Incentives and Compensation processes is paramount to a successful SPM strategy. This guide provides an overview of how it enables a modern approach to SPM as well as common challenges in effective Sales Incentives and Compensation. Learn how to avoid your salespeople needing to be a human calculator because they are concerned about inaccuracies in their compensation payments. Use this guide to deepen your understanding of how to link Sales Incentives & Compensation with SPM to improve performance across the organization.

Incentives and compensation plans play a vital role in determining your organizational sales strategy. Typically, sales and operational leads are focused on how they can help their salespeople succeed. Enable your sales organization to drive efficient and effective sales activities by aligning behaviors and organizational performance objectives. In short, successful sales teams derive motivation from measurable metrics that earn them compensation-based rewards.

Sales crediting, accruals, and commission checks. If it takes significant amounts of manual work involving spreadsheets to calculate compensation for complex deals, you’re losing valuable time and resources. Increasing the accuracy of your compensation planning removes the tendency for your sales talent to feel they need to do shadow accounting to check accuracy.

Increasing transparency in your processes in turn increases loyalty from your sales organization. Give your sales talent confidence by providing them real-time access to accurate, relevant data that seamlessly integrates with standard tools such as your CRM, so the process is transparent for all stakeholders. Complete transparency just isn’t possible with endless spreadsheets and outdated sales reports.

Digital transformation is well underway and increased uncertainty has only heightened the need for flexibility. The ability to flexibly adjust, report, and audit your Sales Incentives & Compensation processes is a vital element of modern SPM. Ensure that you can easily drill down to a granular level on individual performance insights as well as see “the big picture” so you can give your salespeople valuable time back to do what matters most.

“I use the Jedox sales and finance cubes every day and it’s great to have the answers to my questions at my fingertips without asking the team to run reports for me.”

Rob Gratton – CEO, Cleanseas

Sales Incentives and Compensation as a part of modern SPM is about more than just money. While technology provides significant opportunities to optimize value creation, it is also a set of processes designed to support unified, collaborative planning. Incentive plans, compensation models, and data analysis all provide pathways to motivate your salespeople, close more deals, and maximize long-term business performance.

It all starts with planning, and any plan is only as good as the data it was based on. Transparency, accuracy, and flexibility are all important components of Sales Incentives and Compensation processes. Sales planning solutions that were effective more than a decade ago are no longer sufficient to keep pace with rising uncertainty and rapidly changing technology. Can your salespeople easily view their compensation plans with just a few clicks?

Avoid conflict with more accurately calculated compensation and transparent processes. When your CFO needs to write a commission check each quarter, how easy is it to determine an accurate amount? Eliminate manual dispute resolution with modern Sales Performance Management that unifies data from all relevant sources to simplify complex compensation calculations.

Is your sales team able to use their time for what really matters? It all starts with unified data across the organization so your sales data is accurately represented in your sales planning, territory and quota plans, and compensation processes. The tools used for sales data preparation are an important decision in this journey. Increased collaboration across the organization means a higher need for supporting technology that can simplify complexity without sacrificing quality.

A simplified solution for your sales planning processes helps you to overcome the challenges according to sales incentives and compensation. Sophisticated and strategic sales planning means a level playing field for everyone, including fair and balanced incentive programs that support appropriate compensation for all. An effective software solution helps you ensure a well-implemented sales compensation model so that sales goals are aligned with compensation plan objectives.

Ensure consistent communication and create a uniform and efficient data basis for implementing sales goals. A unified and consistent data foundation ensures that targets are aligned with compensation plan objectives. In the long term, this means you are better positioned to retain top sales talent – an important piece of the puzzle for modern sales performance management.

Jedox provides sales organizations the tools to drive efficient and effective sales activities by aligning behaviors and organizational performance objectives. In short, successful sales teams derive motivation from accurate and transparent compensation plans.

Unified planning increases efficiency and effectiveness across all areas of the company by supporting employees in planning with a software-based solution. It accelerates and simplifies processes while clearly revealing value creation opportunities.

Improved sales insights allow accurate planning and profitable forecasts to be derived. Decision-makers have access to up-to-date, secure data and information. This enables optimal control of the customer and product mix, capacity planning and sales cycles. In talent management, transparent data provides motivation and drive.

Jedox provides the cornerstone to flexible, unified compensation management with a concept of models that are easy to build and modify by business users. Using the model approach allows you to easily build complex calculation processes and integrate them to optimize business automation.

This approach also ensure maximum flexibility and reduces constraints for organizations to decide how their business processes are run. Pre-built models for specific business challenges such as Sales Compensation make more efficient and effective sales planning easy, but also provide important accuracy and transparency to easily meet the needs of a dynamic, growing business. Experience unrivaled flexibility built to support the sales organization of the future.

Transforming your sales incentives and compensation management with a unified, software-based solution adapts your sales planning processes to the speed of change. Jedox enables accurate, transparent, and flexible sales incentives and compensation planning so you always know the check you’re signing is right on target.