In this article published on Salesopedia Bob Conlin, Centive’s CMO, discusses the importance of sales compensation and incentive pay in influencing both the performance and morale of your sales team.

Says Bob, “Sales compensation plan design is a science; there is no art to the process. Sales compensation plans based on gut feel or ‘what worked at my last company’ are guaranteed to result in missed revenue, commission budget overruns, and/or costly sales rep turnover. To create quality plans that optimize sales performance, morale and effectiveness, follow a repeatable and structured approach to the design of new sales compensation plans.”

Bob goes on to elaborate on the critical steps of best-practice sales compensation plan design, from knowing the company goals to plan measuring and adjusting.  

As an industry leader in on-demand sales compensation, Centive is committed to keeping its flagship solution, Compel, closely aligned with the ever evolving business needs of its current and future customers. Centive seeks customer input through a variety of sources, such as the professional services, support and sales teams, the annual Customer Advisory Panel and on-site visits with our customers.

As part of the formal Customer Feedback Program, the product management team visits five or more customers every quarter to observe their “day in the life” experience, review any enhancement requests, and answer questions with the team responsible for sales commission management. Customer input is a key ingredient in determining the new and enhanced functionality of each product release.

Compel users appreciate the opportunity to share experience, learn about upcoming capabilities and how to maximize the value of new functionality and relate it to their business goals.

“We appreciate the time Centive spent with us as part of the Customer Feedback Program. Compel’s product manager sat down with me for an entire day to observe firsthand how I use Compel, suggest alternative approaches, explore opportunities for improvement and answer any questions.”

Lilian Paratore, Financial Analyst, Psion Teklogix

Centive’s flagship solution, Compel, is an affordable, on-demand sales compensation management solution that automates the entire sales compensation process in one secure, centralized system. Compel goes beyond just calculating accurate sales commission and bonus payments; it also provides strategic value by enabling customers to model and forecast sales commission expense, optimize plan effectiveness, and drive sales performance and top-line revenue growth.

To schedule a meeting with Compel’s product manager or to sign up for the upcoming Customer Advisory Panel in October 2007, please contact Sarah Carlisle at scarlisle@centive.com or by phone at (781) 852-3601.

Jim Dickie, a partner with CSO Insights, a research firm that specializes in benchmarking CRM and sales effectiveness initiatives, and frequent contributor to DestinationCRM, pens an article on the benefits of automating sales incentive management. Jim reviews market trends and concludes that it is the new generation of sales compensation systems, such as Compel, that is driving the acceptance of automated sales incentive management.

Says Dickie, “This year our project reviews of firms that have replaced in-house commission management systems with one of the new breed of commercial offerings (especially on-demand offerings) saw win-win-win results. The win for the reps is they can easily see how much they are getting paid and why. The win for sales managers is the ability to see specifically what impact their commission plans are having on behavior. And if companies do want to change compensation plans they now have the ability to model the impact those changes will have on future margins. Last, the finance departments win, because just about all the headaches they have been getting each month or quarter around ‘fixing’ the mistakes from their old systems will be eliminated.”