Leverage Sales Compensation to Drive Sales Performance

Sales compensation is one of your greatest sales performance management tools; no other program will drive sales behavior, and ultimately, sales results to the same extent as incentive compensation. Getting salespeople to sell the right products and services to the right customers at the right price is the best way to increase revenue and profits, and compensation is the best lever to motivate sales people. The management truism, "what gets measured gets managed and what gets awarded gets done," is spot on. Sales representatives are much more likely to work towards a company's strategic goals when properly motivated by well-designed, accurately calculated, and frequently communicated sales compensation plans.

Achieving these goals requires a proper technology foundation - one that supports agility, speed, accuracy, reporting and analysis. Unfortunately, in most organizations, this technology foundation is absent. In fact, most companies today manage sales compensation programs with Excel spreadsheets and Access databases.

As a result, sales executives are handcuffed by slow, rigid, and unsophisticated systems that provide no strategic value, and sales representatives are frustrated and de-motivated by delays, errors, and uncertainties in their commission payments.

The result is the Performance Gap. The Performance Gap is the delta between the performance results executives expect from their sales compensation programs . . .

Software Review: Sales Compensation Management Solution

Blogger Julien Dionne takes a look at Centive's award winning on-demand Sales Compensation Management solution - Centive Compel.

In his popular blog on Sales Compensation and Sales Performance Management, Julien Dionne provides a high-level overview of Centive Compel.

Key observations include:

~ "One nice aspect of Compel is that all its functionalities are bundled within the core application (no additional modules are required for reporting, modeling, analytics, etc.)."

~ "Many companies like Adobe, Salary.com, McKesson, Cars.com and Sterling Commerce selected Compel to automate their sales compensation."

~ "Another very interesting feature of the salesperson dashboard is the ability to display sale opportunities (from salesforce.com or other CRM/SFA systems) and the effect they have on the rep’s total compensation."

~ "Centive uses effective dating for everything: people records, quotas, measures, plans, transactions, results, reports, etc., which makes its maintenance much easier. It also solves the difficult problem of handling prior period adjustments - Compel recognizes the crediting rules, roll-ups and structures that were in place at the time of the original transaction, and trues-up the adjustment to the current period."

~ "Compel also seems to offer all the functionalities anyone could be looking for, and does so without the need to purchase additional modules."

Read more here: Incentive, Compensation and Sales Performance Management Review

Centive Press Release – Sales Compensation News

Centive Named to JMP Securities' Hot 100 Software Companies

LOWELL, Mass., May 21, 2008 – Centive, the leader in on-demand solutions for sales compensation and sales performance management, today announced it was named to JMP Securities' 2008 report entitled, "The Hot 100: The Best Privately Held Software Companies." This report profiles 100 of the leading private companies in the software industry as identified by the software research team at JMP Securities.

"We are pleased to be honored with inclusion in the Hot 100 report by JMP Securities," said Michael Torto, president and CEO, Centive. "The employees at Centive have worked hard to earn a stellar reputation for delivering superior on-demand solutions, exceptional customer service and innovative market vision. Recognition by JMP Securities is something we will celebrate as a company; it's cool to be hot."

Centive's flagship product, Centive Compel®, is an affordable on-demand solution for modeling, managing, reporting and analyzing sales compensation programs. Compel is much more than just a commission calculation tool; it offers companies strategic value by providing sales representatives and managers with real-time visibility into commission earnings and key sales performance analytics. With Compel, sales organization stay aligned, focused and motivated to achieve performance targets.

The "Hot 100" recognition is the most recent of a string of awards and accolades bestowed upon Centive since the launch of Compel® in May 2005 as the market's first on-demand solution for automating sales performance and sales compensation management. Last week Centive was named a finalist in the "Best Customer Service" category for the American Business Awards.  In 2007 Compel earned the "Product of the Year" award and the "CRM Excellence" award from Technology Marketing Corporation, and the CRM WizKids Award from Beagle Research.  Compel is also a winner of the coveted CODiE award for "Best Financial Application. 

About Centive

Centive, headquartered in Lowell, MA, is the recognized leader in on-demand sales performance management. Companies use Centive Compel, hailed by CIO Magazine as the "most widely used choice for sales compensation management," to accurately model and forecast commission costs, calculate commission and bonus earnings and gain real-time visibility into sales performance metrics.  Centive is the first and only on-demand sales compensation / sales performance management vendor to be recognized as a SAS-70 Type II service provider.   To learn more about Centive, please visit http://www.centive.com/ or call 1-877-CENTIVE

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Centive, Compel, Inspire Performance, From Prospect to Paycheck and the Carrot logo are registered trademarks of Centive, Inc.  All other company or product names are or may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Media Contact:
Bob Conlin
Centive
781-852-3500
bconlin@centive.com